


let's leave this small town and everything behind

by delurks



Series: beyond the borderlands [14]
Category: The Yogscast
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Universe, Borderlandscast, Clones, Death, Dreams, Feelings, Gen, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicide, Survivor Guilt, Unfortunate Implications, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-30
Updated: 2017-03-30
Packaged: 2018-10-12 21:13:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10499589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delurks/pseuds/delurks
Summary: what happens in t-bone junction stays in t-bone junction. except, when it comes to zylus and daltos, nothing’s ever that simple. or so zylus assumes.this fic picks up shortly after ‘this town ain’t big enough for the two of us’ and ‘tlvh’ chapter twelve.





	

**Author's Note:**

> this one is a particularly heavy fic. it includes a small dose of violence, glossing over of guilt and ptsd, one occurrence of suicide, and implied nsfw. also, there’s some weird shit involving what happens when a fast travel station (?) malfunctions. yes, the question mark is deliberate.

Lalnable arrives in T-Bone Junction for the second time. The ghost town is exactly as he remembers it. Everything’s still painted over with healthy coatings of sand and dust. He thinks that it’d form its own protective layering. His hand came away in grime when he’d closed the door, leaving the Fast Travel Station behind.

Wiping his hand on a clean cloth, Lalnable wanders through the town. It’s been weeks since his last visit. Buildings hunker down like hibernating rakk hives, dozing and eerily silent. 

Stacks of crated supplies form a formidable barricade along a few of the roads. It almost reaches the rooftops, every box piled in precise rows and columns. Nothing protrudes out to help a climber’s fingers searching for an edge to grip. Zylus must be super bored to resort to master level fort building.

No life prowls the streets. If Lalnable hadn’t known that Zylus lived here, this would have been the perfect ghost town. All it needs is a stray tumbleweed to finish it off.

Lalnable’s aimless wandering takes him outside of the town, having made a wrong turn (or several) around the barricade. Turning to avoid the blinding sun, he squints at the swaying highway sign above him.

Rust has nearly corroded the bolts off, leaving them vulnerable to be torn off by the wind. The creaking sign still manages to cling to its rickety backing with sheer stubbornness. Underneath the muck left on it by the weather’s doing, Lalnable barely deciphers the neatly painted directions and numbers.

Well, well, a ‘2’ is painted over the ‘1’. The original population’s long since been sanded away (whether by elbow grease or nature’s handiwork). Lalnable ponders if this means that Zylus has finally accepted that Daltos is living in the town for real with him.

“Doc!” Speaking of which, there’s Zylus. He’s sitting under at a bus shelter, a rag held to his forehead. A wave makes him stand out from the dull scenery.

Small wonder how Lalnable hadn’t noticed him before;  Zylus’ uniform is the same exact shade of brown as the background and T-Bone Junction’s dominant hues. A friendly, strained grin is on his face.

“It’s Lalnable,” Lalnable tersely corrects once he’s close enough. Even from several metres away, all the dried blood streaking Zylus’ shirt collar, jacket, head and hands is visible. It’s not a pleasant sight. “What  _ happened _ to you?”

There’s not just blood, there’s also bruises and scratches adorning Zylus’ face, like he’s strolled through a war zone.

Something inside Lalnable’s chest clenches at the sight. It’s the kind of squeeze that a doctor feels when meeting a patient who deserves far better than what reality deals out, like a crooked hand in a card game.

After being on Pandora for this long, Lalnable’s learned to deal. It still doesn’t erase everything he ends up blocking out. The reality is a lot less pretty and vastly different to what he’d been taught to recognize, one of the harsher lessons medical school neglected to pass on.

A textbook picture and a snappy summary of ‘this is what happens when an arm gets infected’ doesn’t quite form the whole picture.

When Lalnable is faced with an arm oozing pus that’s gone black all around edges, the textbook doesn’t quite get across  _ the smell _ , the  _ wrongness _ of an arm awkwardly bent at ninety degrees, how the feverish patient is pleading for help (or death, Pandora doesn’t discriminate), or the terrible sound they make when he starts cutting, because it’s ‘let them die’ or ‘save them in the only way he knows how’.

Usually, people are grateful for his efforts and if not, they learned to deal with it. Lalnable’s always glad when he checks in on his former patients to find them still puttering around alive.

The good news is that this isn’t the worst case scenario he’s been summoned to bear witness to. 

That one goes to the emergency house call he’d made several weeks ago. After that, Lalnable always warned Daisy and Peculiar to lock all their doors and windows. 

Nighttime is when skags are at their ravenous. Skags can’t pass up the chance to munch on meat left all alone in an unattended crib that’s low to the floor, tantalizingly rocking next to a wide open window...

Well, he’s here to help ease the madness in whatever way he can. While Pandora’s never lacking in patients, it could certainly use more people like him. It could also use less people like Zylus and Daltos, because Lalnable can’t believe that they’ve lasted this long together without a fatal incident.

“He walked right into a Loader because he was too busy staring at me,” Daltos says, striding over to join the two from the main road. The smug look he’s wearing tells Lalnable that he’s rather proud of his joke at Zylus’ expense.

Two Loaders march behind him in a synchronized stride, stumping along the road. His condition’s identical to Zylus’. A vertical line of browned red marks Daltos’ lower lip. Lalnable doubts that it’s lipstick or he’d missed when shaving.

Zylus doesn’t think it’s a joke, hotly retorting, “That’s not what happened!” He glares at Daltos like he can will a lightning bolt to strike him on the spot. All traces of the grin’s given way to a faint blush. It doesn’t make much of a difference with all the dried blood on his face.

“I see.” Lalnable raises a skeptical eyebrow, looking from one to the other. “Do you have a safe place for me to examine the both of you in?”

“Yes, my garage. It’s the closest.” A brown and green camouflaged Loader assists Zylus to rise, helping him limp to the garage. A grateful look’s thrown at the machine. When Lalnable looks back, a less smug Daltos is following at a safe distance.

The garage is an interior space large enough for two technicals to park side by side. One of the twin roller doors rise to admit the four. As expected, the garage possesses the noxious reek of oil, grease and dust. It’s not bothering Zylus or Daltos, who seem immune.

Lalnable wrinkles his nose. The garage will do, for his intended purposes. There are worse environments to do doctoring in, from a skag farm mill’s shed to the back of an armored bus (and Sirens, one to be exact, had helped him survive that chaotic day).

Once sheltered from the outside elements in the back room, Lalnable tugs gloves on, the snap of latex echoing for a few seconds. Zylus eases himself onto an empty workbench.

“You want me to have a look at this first?” A questioning gloved hand’s raised to Zylus’ forehead.

“Please.” Leaning forward, Zylus allows him to find the rag’s corner. Lalnable begins to peel off the sticky, bloodied material, separating it from the wound underneath. A low, pained noise escapes Zylus. It’s hastily bitten off. His eyes flicker shut, his expression drawn.

“Nearly there,” Lalnable grunts, feeling the remaining threads strain about to give up. He nearly tells Zylus that it’s alright to show pain. Belatedly, Lalnable realises that Daltos is still present, forgetting about it.

“Fu-” Zylus curses, flinching as Lalnable’s arm snaps back, holding the bloody thing. His fingers skim the edge of the wound as he sits upright.

“That will scar,” Lalnable observes, tossing the ruined rag into a bin. “The other metal bit can come out too.”

He’s referring to the metal bars embedded into Zylus’ head denoting former Dahl military rank. One is missing. Upon closer inspection, it looks like it’d been ripped out, leaving a hell of a wound behind.

“If it’s all the same to you, please leave it alone.” Zylus’ eyes flick to the floor, like he knows that Lalnable might be judging him.

He’s not. It would be simple to remove it now under local anaesthetic, and let the whole section heal. With the defensive way Zylus is holding himself, it’s not the time for a lecture.

“If you insist.” Lalnable lays out a portable medical kit on the bench next to him. It’s one of his own modest inventions. It ‘contains everything he needs to get shit done’, as Parvis would crudely put it. “Shirt and jacket off, please.”

Zylus obliges, folding up both items neatly to leave them next to him. Lalnable swallows his surprise at all the damage that’d been hidden, dropping into ‘clinical’ mode. Five minutes pass. Zylus fidgets. In silence, Lalnable catalogues the full spectrum of damage.

At last, Lalnable states, “There’s not much I can do for these. If you want a more detailed examination, we’ll have to head to my clinic at Three Horns.” Even as he says it, the way Zylus’ shoulders set tells him that he’s not going to take him up on the offer.

“No, it’s fine. Just do what you can.” Zylus rests his hands in his lap, watching Lalnable in turn, clearly nervous.

Over in the corner, Daltos looks away. He steps over the toolboxes, heading for the garage door that’s left open just a crack.

Right as his hand lugs up the door, Lalnable calls out to him without turning around, “Your examination is next, so please stay close by.”

“Sure, doc.” Daltos ducks out of the garage, the door rolling up with a creak.

“It’s  _ Lalnable _ !” Too late, the garage door’s already grinded shut. Sand grains skitter across the metal floor to rest in the cracks.

When he’s gone, Lalnable tuts, starting to clean up Zylus’ forehead. He lowers his voice as he leans in. “So, how exactly did you get all these injuries?”

“I, um.” Zylus flounders. He nearly knocks the hand removing the last of the blood. Lalnable smoothly works around the accidental bump. “Ignore what Daltos said about the Loader,” Zylus mumbles.

“It’s okay to tell me what happened. Your companion won’t know what you tell me.” Lalnable’s mouth flattens into a thin line. The forehead wound is going to heal messily. Stitches won’t work on it; the skin’s far too damaged.

“He’s not my companion,” Zylus mumbles.

Busying with the contents of his medical kit so that he doesn’t say anything hurtful (see Parvis, he can be  _ nice _ ), Lalnable notes the way the cybernetic eye flickers.

It’s hardly noticeable to anyone but an experienced technician. The nonstop flicker’s a dire sign of the eye needing an autofocusing calibration. He doesn’t point it out, checking that the last of the blood’s wiped away.

“Did he do this to you?” When Zylus doesn’t answer, Lalnable exhales softly, beginning a medical file for Zylus in his HUD. “You certainly don’t seem like the type to intentionally injure yourself.”

“No, I’m not,” Zylus firmly says. He’s the type to mentally torture himself instead. It goes without saying that he keeps that thought to himself to avoid involving Lalnable.

Lalnable still doesn’t say anything about how evasive Zylus is being, failing to answer a basic question. “Very well.”

“You won’t tell anyone, will you?” That’s when Zylus lifts his head, to look right at Lalnable. His mismatched eyes are full of worried seriousness.

Patient confidentiality is a double-edged expectation. People described it as a sword, to be wielded when convenient. In Lalnable’s eyes, expectations could wrought more devastating consequences than a weapon.

“I won’t.” An Anshin bandage is taped into place over Zylus’ forehead. Lalnable presses the edges down until they take hold, not missing how Zylus squirms at the sternness of his tone. “The exact manner of your injuries still concerns me, however.”

The pin sized digistruct module on the bandage flashes. It begins to dispense the specialised mix of antibiotics and healing inducers. That’s courtesy of Minty’s connections up on Elpis (and again, Lalnable owes Hollie one for coming through with critical supplies).

“They’ll all heal up. Eventually.” That doesn’t inspire any great confidence in Zylus’ ability to cope after what he’d just been through.

Once he’s tugged the dirty gloves off, Lalnable touches Zylus on the shoulder, lightly. That’s to avoid the large bruise spreading along the muscle there. “Are you absolutely sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?”

“I’m sure,” Zylus softly says, gingerly touching the tape holding the bandage in place with a finger.

“Here’s instructions for caring for your wounds. Other than that, rest up.” Lalnable removes his hand. He steps back, forwarding the notes he’s written to Zylus, also handing him a sealed, self-care packet. 

Zylus despawns the packet before tugging on his shirt over his shoulders. “How much is this visit?”

“Before you pay me, I’d like to talk to about your cybernetic eye.” Panic floods Zylus’ expression. The button he’s doing ends up attached to the wrong slit. He hastily undoes it, trying again. Lalnable continues like he hadn’t just seen the fumble, “Later, perhaps during my follow-up appointment. For now, let’s focus on your other wounds first.”

“Thank you.” The panic fades from Zylus’ expression as he tucks his (now correctly) buttoned shirt in. The jacket’s slung over a shoulder.

“By the way, I also want to ask you something else.” The immediate tension Zylus radiates at what the question might be causes Lalnable to give him a faint, wry smile. “Relax, it’s nothing related to your injuries.”

“What is it?” Zylus’ tone is tentative, cautiously feeling the tail end of the conversation out.

“There’s a ‘two’ painted on your town sign. When did you do that?” The white paint can’t have been there for long, the edges flaking and crumbling. It can’t have existed before his initial visit to the town.

To Lalnable’s surprise, Zylus flushes a light pink as he hands over the combined fees for the visit. “I did it after you left.”

“I see. It was very professionally done.” Almost a little too professionally, a strange occurrence on Pandora where almost every job is a slapdash and a rushed affair. Checking and pocketing the money, Lalnable nods in farewell, satisfied with that answer. “Take care, Zylus. I don’t encourage becoming a repeat patient.”

Daltos enters the garage once he spots Zylus leaving (without acknowledging him). He’d waited outside, not quite eavesdropping but not close enough for Lalnable needing to run after him when it’s his turn. The garage door rolls down once he’s inside.

“And what about  _ your _ injuries?” Lalnable says, once Daltos is seated and taken off his gloves, shirt and jacket. The items are dropped into a loose pile by his left hand.

“We had a fight,” Daltos simply says, looking him right in the eye, daring him to comment.

“It’s refreshing that you’re more forthcoming than your companion.” Lalnable holds up a portable sterilisation tool, running it over his medical kit. It emits a small beep when it’s finished. Putting it away, he resets his medical kit, tugging on a new pair of gloves. Daltos consents to the examination with a nod. “How’s your heart?”

Compared to Zylus’ examination needing to tread carefully with every question, Lanable adopts a blunt, conversational approach with Daltos. Daltos seems to appreciate it. He also doesn’t deny that Zylus is his companion.

“Skipped a bit during that fight. It’s still the same, though,” Daltos reports. “Not as bad as it was when you first checked me out.”

He hadn’t forgotten how difficult that fight had been, balancing every move against his own body’s painful handicap. All those close calls racked his near-death experiences up by at least five counts. All the tally marks wouldn’t fit on the giant psycho’s Cant’s whole back, let alone a rough estimate.

“Do you need a refill?” Lalnable’s fingers skim over the once burned skin on Daltos’ chest. “These have healed up rather well. It’s a shame about the scarring, though.”

“If you can spare it.” Daltos shrugs the inquisitive fingers on his chest off. “The burns don’t hurt anymore, and I’m used to scarring.”

“Scarring is unsightly, and has its own complications. I guess you don’t need to be told that, though.” 

Lalnable will always be astounded that bandits could make a fascinating study in scars and their numerous stories about said scars. He could write a quadrilogy, and still have enough left to publish five more books.

“I know what to expect.” He gives Daltos a sharp look for the way Daltos’ mouth twitches at the last moment, like he’d just stopped himself from tacking on ‘doc’.

“In any case, your refill.” Lalnable hands over a small pill bottle. Daltos stashes it in one of his jacket’s side pockets. “I suppose you don’t want to talk about what happened either?”

“No,” is Daltos’ blunt response. 

He appreciates what Lalnable’s trying to do, but at this time, he’s still not interested in discussing what goes on with Zylus to any stranger (including Ravs being a well-meaning but nosy, meddling ass).

“Thought so.” Lalnable ‘tsks’ at all the damage from the fight. It’s hard to say who’d suffered more damage, in the end. A particular set stands out from all the others.

Spanning across Daltos’ upper arms are the imprints of at least ten (and good grief, Lalnable’s only done a basic count) nasty bruises. A few have merged to form a giant mosaic of blue, purple and black patches. More from other blows fill in the dark, tanned skin all over the rest of his body.

It’s unusual how the arm wounds don’t look like they’d come from human digits. The gaps between the blackened bruises are too spread out, with small angular circles evenly spaced out along the skin.

Crescent fingernail marks ring Daltos’ neck, along with a few tinier ones. The latter has a more plausible source, at least.

A note’s scrawled in Daltos’ medical file that’s present in Lalnable’s HUD. Daltos wouldn’t know, since Lalnable’s poking at the bruises, frowning.

Daltos watches him closely, without wincing at the examination he’s patiently tolerating. “You trying to play relationship counselor? Ravs already tried that. It ain’t gonna work.”

“Hardly.” Lalnable concludes that he can’t do much about the bruising, aside from recommend the usual methods on how to deal with them. “I’m just making sure that the next time I see you and Zylus, it won’t be in body bags.”

“We don’t get body bags out here on this shithole.”

“You get my drift.” Lalnable shakes his head. “Same instructions as I gave Zylus. Don’t do anything physically strenuous or risky, and definitely, do not get into another fight with each other.” A disdainful look is directed at Daltos’ chest. “I’m done, you can get dressed.”

“What makes you think I’d do any or all of those things?” Daltos pretends to look innocent, pulling his bloody shirt over his head. He accepts the self-care package as well.

“A hunch.” Disposing of the gloves, Lalnable packs up his kit, stowing it back in his inventory. He holds up a hand when Daltos reaches for his digistruct modules. “Forget it, Zylus paid the medical fee for himself and you earlier.”

“Did he now.” Daltos glances at the garage exit which is slightly open. A flicker of shadow darts away at one of the door’s cracks, almost as if someone was eavesdropping.

“As always, if your heart starts to feel off, contact me  _ immediately _ , or if you need another refill.” Lalnable points to the navy blue jacket that smells of ash. “I’d also recommend that you stop smoking.”

“Thanks.” Daltos zips up his jacket, tugging his gloves back on. His modules are clipped onto his belt. “And no, I’ll quit when I’m dead.”

“You’re welcome.” Lalnable doesn’t bother to react to that remark, letting Daltos pull up the garage door for him. “I’ll contact you in a few weeks for another appointment. At the moment, I’m trying to track down a defibrillator.”

He doesn’t mention that he might recruit Lalna into building him one out of junk and spare parts, if he can’t find a secondhand one in time. Lalna might appreciate having a side project that’s not consisting of illegal tinkering with his arm, Larry Robert or shooting people.

“Why?” Frowning, Daltos leads him along the road. “I thought the meds are fine.”

“There’s some long term side effects of the medication that I’d rather avoid.” Lalnable pauses, to check his ECHO device for any messages (especially from Parvis, who he left in charge of the clinic). Daltos patiently waits. Lalnable puts the device away, brushing back a blond strand of hair behind his ear. “Restarting your heart is the best option. If not, I can put in a request for a pacemaker.”

“Can’t I just run into another tesla grenade?” Daltos flatly asks.

Lalnable gives him a pained look for that poor joke. “That could kill you, you know.”

“Yeah, but it’s stupid enough to possibly work.” Ah yes, bandit logic. Daltos is apparently not above it.

“Daltos, please swear to me, right now, that you will  _ not _ run into a tesla grenade to fix your heart.” 

This is like telling Parvis not to touch the jar filled with lollipops (which are strictly reserved for  _ patients _ ). Five minutes later, Parvis will be walking around with a white stick peeking out of the corner of his mouth. Speaking of which.

“Relax, Lalnable, once was bad enough.” Daltos shakes his head. “I’m not ready to be coddled by Zylus again.”

Lalnable suppresses a sigh, reminding himself that he’s here to help and not lecture. A quick pat of his digistruct module spawns two wrapped lollipops (one black and one blue). He hands them both to Daltos. “Here. I forgot to give one to Zylus earlier.”

Next to him, Daltos stops mid-step, his face lighting up. “Are you fucking serious?” Daltos turns, taking the lollipops off Lalnable, like he can’t believe what he’s holding or seeing. He turns them over in one hand, almost reverently.

“You act like you’ve never seen a lollipop before,” Lalnable notes, trying not to smile. Some of his less well off patients react exactly like Daltos did when getting a sweet treat for cooperating.

“I haven’t had one since I left the military and got all my shots.” Daltos unwraps the blue one, popping it into his mouth. To Lalnable (and he’s sure that Zylus would agree), it’s a better sight than a cigarette.

“Well, it’s also good to know that you’re up to date on your shots.” Lalnable nearly takes a wrong turn. Daltos steers him onto the right road, the other lollipop tucked in his inventory.

“Why do you have lollipops on you?”

“Parvis,” Lalnable dryly says like it’ll explain it.

Not to mention Ravs, Lalna, Will Strife, Elora, Trell, Nilesy, Lomadia, Saberial, Zoeya and Nanosounds (and anybody else with a sweet tooth) sneaking out with one whenever they pass through. At least their constant raiding of the candy jar is saving Parvis a costly trip to the dentist.

Against Lalnable’s expectations, Daltos laughs, taking the lollipop out of his mouth to talk. “How’s he doing?” 

It also goes against Lalnable’s assumption that Daltos would despise Parvis for well, Parvis being Parvis. He sounds perfectly fine in asking after him.

“You know each other?” Lalnable is simultaneously is and isn’t surprised to learn this. 

Parvis could make friends with a rabid skag if he wasn’t afraid of getting bitten. Come to think of it, Parvis is scared of a lot of things, now that he thinks about it.

“We’re friends, according to him. Also used to play poker with him, Ravs and Sparkles once a week. Good times.” Daltos looks nostalgic for about three seconds before shrugging it off. “Hey, do you do house calls to bandit country?”

“I see. Parvis is my assistant. Though assistant would be stretching it.” Lalnable thinks for a moment, perplexed at the obvious change of topic. “I do. Why?”

“Tell him I said ‘hi’.” Daltos opens the door for Lalnable. “Nothing, just wondering.”

“I’m certain Parvis will appreciate it. As always, do take care,” Lalnable bids, choosing not to ask. A surveyor flies past him to dart upwards, towards the Fast Travel Station’s roof.

“I bet you say that to all your patients.” Lollipop stick waggling in his mouth, Daltos smirks, waving at Lalnable. 

The door closes with a quiet snap. Lalnable waits for the Fast Travel Station to power up as the sand is swept from the solar panels on the roof. A miniature desert cascades down over the view looking out onto T-Bone Junction’s roundabout.

Through the orange tinted, curving window, he watches Zylus round a corner, nearly bumping into Daltos. He steps back, mumbling something. Grinning, Daltos presents the black lollipop with a flourish.

Surprise, then joy infuses Zylus’ expression when he recognises what Daltos is holding out to him. A brilliant, radiant smile begins to spread across Zylus’ face. Not a single trace of the meekness or guilt exists, just for a (admittedly, heartwarming) minute.

Zylus graciously accepts the lollipop, unwrapping it to pop it in his mouth. He and Daltos turn to face the window. Zylus waves, almost like he knows that Lalnable is watching. Daltos looks pleased with himself for successfully delivering the gift.

Smiling to himself, Lalnable inputs the coordinates for Three Horns. 

With any luck, Parvis will have discovered that Lalnable had Lalna install a biometric lock on the candy jar. That is, if he managed to find it first, that is. It’s hidden behind the eighth box of needles on the third shelf of surgical items. Needles repelled Parvis like a magnet to another magnet.

\--

Once Lalnable’s departed T-Bone Junction, Zylus heads off to recuperate as part of the doctor’s orders. This leaves Daltos outside on his own. He’d prefer to be indoors too, though not anywhere near Zylus. 

He tries to forget the look on Zylus’ face when he’d received the lollipop.

Given that they’d just tried to kill each other several hours ago, a little space is necessary. Lalnable might have even called the decision ‘healthy’, if he’d known.

There’s not a lot left to talk about, with Zylus. Truth be told, Daltos doesn’t know to proceed. Whatever they’d argued about leading up to the fight’s cleared the issues they’d both been keeping inside of them for years.

It wiped the board clean, leaving it open to other possibilities. As always, in the center is BebopVox. It’d been easier to move before, if he had some idea of Zylus’ intentions.

What really strikes Daltos is that Zylus hadn’t wanted to kill him. He’d actively chosen to spare him.

It hadn’t been a natural decision. In Zylus’ eyes, Daltos had seen the burning, murderous intent, the insistent drive to avenge the removed eye, plus all the brutal years of living on Pandora that afflicted Zylus, turning him into a fragile mess of a human being.

Nobody left Pandora without the scars (mental and/or physical) to show for it. Here, fragile didn’t just mean ‘melted under his bare hand because he’s so starved for touch’, it also meant ‘capable of killing anything and anyone because they’ve been pushed too far over the edge’.

At the same time though, Zylus demonstrated remarkable resilience in shooting the wall at the last second. Despite that, Zylus hadn’t done it to be kind or merciful. It’s to draw out both their mutual suffering. Behold, the cruelty of the living versus that of the dead.

Daltos can live with that, for a while longer. Spite could fuel someone through a mortal wound. His beaten lieutenants proved that time and time again until it’s one wound or beating too many.

Done with his pointless musings for the day, he heads towards his default hideout. It’s one of the buildings that used to house plague victims. 

All the rooms still stink of the decontamination bombs, giving off a sterile, partially burned wooden reek that makes his head spin if he doesn’t open a window. Otherwise, if he ignores the other smell (look, dead people, no matter the manner of death, left a  _ very _ distinctive odour behind), it’s not all that bad.

Ever since he cleaned it up, Zylus avoids it like, well, the plague (rakk fever, the helpful locals had called it, with fearful shudders and dread coloring their hushed tones).

The crunch of the lollipop beginning to crack when Daltos chews on it drags him back to the present, out of his thoughts.

Automatically, he shifts the pieces to the other side of his mouth, away from the hole that’s his missing tooth. Fuck, he should have asked Lalnable look at the gap to see if anything can be done to fill it in. Remembering it makes him curse the Vault Hunters for the hundredth time. 

There’s another sound aside from the destruction of delicious candy.

For every step he takes, a series of solid metal clunks collide with the cracked pavement behind him. Cautious, he slows his walk. The clunking matches his pace. Daltos leans on a brick wall like he’s catching his breath.

The last of the lollipop’s melted down to a sweetened, gooey paste, which he takes his time savouring. A slight turn of his head grants him a view of what’s beside him.

A Loader pauses to nonchalantly examine its reflection in a can, hopping to the side to do so. Across the street, another one is emptying a bin into a dumpster. Nothing tumbles loose, despite the Loader mechanically thumping the bin’s base with a metal fist. 

Ten seconds ago, it’d been watching him. He’s so sure of it, tossing away the chewed white stick (scoring a point when it sails into the bin).

Conclusion: the two Loaders that’d previously manhandled him on the roof are tailing him, as they previously did to corral him towards Lalnable.

Loaders didn’t share consciousnesses. Each one houses its own operating system and intelligence. It’s either that or Zylus assigned them routine tasks, regardless of what’s already been done. It still doesn’t shake the feeling that there’s more to the Loaders than initially meets the eye.

A third Loader’s blocking the entrance to the building when Daltos strides towards it. Its dusty green and brown camouflage chassis glint in the sun. Its blue eye stares out at him. It dilates until it’s a pinprick, almost an appraising squint.

“ _ Move _ ,” Daltos snaps at it, not in the mood to bully a machine out of his way.

The Loader rushes him, limbs swinging up. With reflexes honed by years of dodging explosions, backstabbers and bullets, Daltos scrambles backwards, drawing Emperor. 

Rather than send him flying, the Loader’s looming over him, driving him backwards. His back collides with a brick wall. Dust crumbles out of the cracks. An old poster (of a busty, carnival dressed woman with far too much clown makeup and cleavage) crinkles under his arm.

Two other Loaders pen him in on either side. The middle Loader’s hands lightly swing in the hot breeze. This is too coordinated to be three individual machines at work. It reminds him of something, or  _ someone _ , rather.

“Ship, is it?” Daltos inquires, keeping his tone light. 

If the A.I.’s been rehoused and repurposed, then he’s warier than usual. Freed A.I.’s proved vastly unpredictable, one reason why Dahl maintained specific parameters for how one should operate and if it didn’t, to terminate it immediately at the nearest disposal facility. In Daltos’ opinion, it’s a waste of a good A.I. and core.

In a tinny, distorted monotone backed with the crackling thrum of static like a radio caught between stations, the middle Loader corrects, “Actually, my name is ‘BebopVox’ now.”

Well, that’s interesting. A.I. didn’t name themselves. They got stuck with the name they’d been given until switching ships. For this one to rename itself (or had Zylus given it that name?) implies that it’s graduated from simply taking orders.

Once upon a time, Daltos would have been proud of his meddling to help the A.I. gain a small semblance of freedom.

If the warship A.I.’s now free, that presents a new set of problems. Like how to persuade it to come back to its original, grounded body with him, especially if it’s chosen to reside across many bodies. It certainly explained the Loaders’ erratic behaviour around him. 

“So, BebopVox, what’d you want?” Daltos eyes the middle Loader.

Can he get in a shot and run for it before it kills him? Not without getting hurt, that is. Emperor remains aligned on the machine’s eye to serve as a weak bluff (which Minty would laugh at, if she’s watching).

The Loaders remain where they are. Again, the middle one speaks. “You will not leave him.”

It takes a moment for Daltos to place who BebopVox is referring to. He swallows, shaking his head. “I can’t promise you that.”

“You will not leave him,” BebopVox repeats.

“You said that already,” He points out, with a slight touch of impatience.

“It wasn’t a statement, it was a threat.” The Loader’s eye widens, revealing the transparent, dome-like cornea and the mass of black wiring that forms the eye’s interior beneath the blue light.

“I see.”

“He has forbidden me to hurt you, but he didn’t mention not talking to you. Or hurting him.”

“Yeah,” Daltos drawls out the word like it’s extremely obvious, “because hurting me means hurting him.”

“Good, you understand that, at least.” Daltos imagines BebopVox sounding pleased. It bobs, hands clapping like rubbish bins being banged together.

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“Everything.” The Loaders step back to make room, still keeping a certain perimeter. Out of the building that the Loaders barred him from entering, a surveyor flies out. It bobs over, carrying an ECHO device in its blue tractor beam.

“Hey, that’s mine-” It’s the ECHO device he’d hidden from Zylus. He tries to snatch it back. BebopVox’s surveyor drifts up, out of his reach.

Fuck, BebopVox knows where he’d hidden it. Daltos had made the mistake of underestimating all the machines in the town. He scowls. It’d be suicidal to pick a fight with BebopVox, who outnumbers and could outmaneuver him. No matter how he looks at it, they’ve got him pinned down.

“Indeed, as lost and found protocol dictates.”

“What you’re doing is technically ‘stealing’,” Daltos points out.

“Relax, I’m merely borrowing it.”

The screen is swung to face him, activating. It shows a direct feed to Zylus’ own device. Daltos wipes the surprise from his face, aware that BebopVox is watching him carefully.

Zylus isn’t resting (like the great big fucking idiot he is), he’s curled up in a chair. He’s wrestling with the one surveyor that’s been giving him nothing but trouble for weeks on end. The bandage on his head is still doing its job. A familiar white stick in Zylus’ mouth bobs as he thoughtfully chews on it.

The ECHO device connected to the feed must be propped up, or left out on the table.

The busted surveyor backfires, letting loose a electric bolt. It sizzles past Zylus’ head. Startled, he drops it. The feed cuts before Daltos can find out if Zylus is okay. Well, he must be. The bolt had narrowly missed him.

Suppressing the instinct to go check on Zylus, a poker faced Daltos holds his hand out. The surveyor drops the device into his hand. He stores it in his inventory before it’s taken away for good. It needed a new hiding place anyway.

“By hurting him, you’re hurting me.” Daltos nearly laughs at the incredible logic going into that plan of theirs. “Doesn’t that contradict your order not to hurt me?”

“He never forbid me from hurting him.” BebopVox’s eye widens. “And I can choose to disobey whatever order I want, including the one not to hurt you.”

“Do you really think that kind of threat’ll work on me?” Daltos despawns Emperor, sensing that he doesn’t need it.

“You may not love him, but you care.”

“Those two things are  _ not _ synonymous.”

A.I. equipped Dahl warships tended to be more bugged than a spiderant colony on the verge of splitting under challenging queens.

There’s no way that BebopVox wouldn't have heard several personal conversations between himself and Zylus. If they had, they’d chosen to stay silent or conceal it from any sweeps of their extensive ship records.

Whether or not it’s because BebopVox favoured him and Zylus is hard to say, seeing a benefit to the arrangement of being able to chat to two officers who didn’t treat them like a mere machine.

Where Zylus has forgotten those conversations, BebopVox remembers. So does Daltos. At a high personal risk (like if Dahl ever demanded him to hand his device over for inspection), he kept hidden copies of those late night talks on his ECHO device. After the crash landing on Pandora, he kept putting off listening to them for clues where it’d all gone wrong and precisely when he’d fucked up.

There’s a significant gap in between the time Daltos left and reunited with Zylus; he’s working off his memories just as much as Zylus is.

BebopVox has known Zylus for longer, so they possess a minor advantage in personally knowing Zylus to predict his reaction. This must be BebopVox’s own personal quest if they’re not working for Dahl.

“The latter will suffice, in making Zylus happy.”

“Really, this is all about his happiness?” Daltos nearly adds that ‘you nearly broke my arms just for that’.

The bruises Lalnable had examined intensely for a minute too long still hurt, panging with every sudden movement or to jolt all the way to his bones. He doubts he’ll be able to do any heavy lifting for a few days without really feeling the burn.

“Yours is nothing to me, but if his happiness depends on you being alive, then I will see fit to assist in whatever way possible, even if I have to break your arms to do so.”

Daltos keeps his gaze on BebopVox’s main body, the Loader addressing him. That’s twice BebopVox’s threatened him. If they’re anything like his bandits, he downplays his reaction to seem calm. On the other hand, BebopVox knows him as well as Zylus (or they think they do) to call his bluff.

“And if I don’t make him happy?” Daltos says out loud the second choice that BebopVox hadn’t given him.

“The power of love compels you to.”

“That’s really fucking cheesy,” Daltos flatly says, pushing off the wall. 

Next to him, the poster of the woman begins to droop. One of the Loaders reaches past to flatten it. He forces himself not to move away from the metal arm capable of snapping his spine in half (which Ravs made look easy and effortless). 

It’ll be fine, this is like staring down Gotha whenever Gotha’s in a real pissy mood about not being allowed to punch Cant over the last pizza. For the eightieth time, Daltos puts all concerned thoughts of his bandits out of his mind (and if he’ll ever see them again, especially Arsenal).

He nearly punches BebopVox when the harsh crackle of feedback blares out from wherever the Loader’s hiding its speaker (or speakers). It’s the equivalent of hearing BebopVox chuckle, as best as they can when they only have a synthetic voicebox. 

There’s an uncanny resemblance between Zylus’ laughter (as rare as a genuine smile from him) and his own, BebopVox’s laughter an eerie mixture of the two sounds. It’s hard to tell if it’s deliberate or if BebopVox is merely emulating their amusement in a form Daltos recognizes.

“I am glad we are at a mutual understanding, Daltos.” BebopVox’s middle Loader bobs, visibly pleased.

“Yeah. Was nice chatting to you,” Daltos says, withholding his sarcasm.

It goes without saying that Zylus is not to learn of their brief chat.

“I will be watching.” The Loaders take a synchronized step backwards, dispersing into the streets of T-Bone Junction to carry out their chores. The distinctive middle one pauses to add, “We will talk again if need be.” A passing surveyor drops a sloshing bottle of water into its hand. It holds it out to him. “Please remember to stay hydrated as it’s predicted to be a record maximum around midday.”

Surprised by BebopVox’s thoughtfulness in spite of everything he’s done, he accepts the bottle. As is habit, he checks it for any signs of tampering. It’s fine. He looks up. “Uh...thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” The Loader bobs, before joining its fellow machines in their ongoing quest to keep T-Bone Junction operational.

Daltos turns, heading into the building. This new development is unexpected, BebopVox choosing to reveal themself to him. For the first time in months, he can’t think of a single clue as to how he can take advantage of this, deeply conflicted about his original and new goal.

\--

The rigging takes less time than it takes for Zylus to salvage the tech out of a junk heap. All of BebopVox’s monitors are secondhand (perhaps a few being a mystical thirdhand). The last one in the living room had trailing wires so exposed that it’s a small miracle it hadn’t spontaneously combusted when turned on.

A few were bound to fry over the years. Zylus is surprised that they’d lasted this long, even with emergency repairs and the barest of patch jobs. To him, more monitors equates to having more eyes around the town. 

On the other hand, that allows him to set up a few extras around the place if BebopVox doesn’t need them. Lately, BebopVox insists on watching rom coms with him, even if he can’t keep up with half the plots, inside jokes or the lightning rotations of characters between seasons and shows.

During those times, BebopVox pretends to be a surveyor being repaired in his lap, keeping him company and providing their own commentary (always its own entertainment). 

It’s nice, passing the time like this, even while he can’t help picking up his latest project to fiddle with it midway through an episode. BebopVox didn’t mind, simply happy to have him indulge their main interest.

At some point, Daltos joined Zylus, sticking to his side of the couch. At first, he almost nods off. That is, until BebopVox began playing the fifth season of ‘Four Times They Punched Me and One Time They Kissed Me’.

In his peripheral vision, Zylus watched him sit up, now clearly interested. Wanting to know why the episode prompted a change in behaviour, Zylus put down his wire cutters to try to focus on the show. BebopVox’s commentary faded, almost as if they wanted him to enjoy the show for what it is without a biased opinion butting in.

Before the two (well, three) of them knew it, four hours flew by. Jolted by the time in his HUD, Zylus turned to stare at Daltos, keenly aware that they’d spent four hours in each other’s company without incident. 

Without a word, Daltos stood up, leaving to go sleep. Zylus followed, wondering if he should say that he didn’t mind this sort of company. He hadn’t, not wanting to ruin the relaxed mood that’d permeated the room by saying something stupid.

He came back the next day, and the day after (largely because BebopVox blocked off his usual hiding spots around town with boxes of rations, the devious fucker). Three weeks later, BebopVox stole over half the couch cushions to clean them, forcing Zylus to budge over to make room for Daltos.

Daltos takes the needle out of his mouth, threading it through his jacket sleeve (torn after a near miss with a Drifter trying to lay its eggs near one of the struts under the town, since BebopVox’s turret is currently in the garage for repairs).

Zylus would have offered to do it for him. Instead, he pinged BebopVox.

> Bebop, what are you doing?

> Doing what?

> You know what I’m talking about!

> I do not!

> Yes you do!

> Oh! That! I suppose you want your couch cushions back. I’m sorry, but they’re currently drying. I’ll put them back tomorrow.

> Never mind.

> Please enjoy the season finale!

That’d been weeks ago. Daltos keeps spending his evenings with him. Still trying not to suspect BebopVox of being up to no good, Zylus tugs the last replacement cable into place, messaging BebopVox to prepare for testing.

Daltos enters the room, a tangle of spare cables hanging over one arm. With a rustle of crinkling plastic, they’re thrown onto the sagging couch.

“You could put those down a little more gently,” Zylus absently says. He hadn’t asked for more cables to be brought in. The gesture’s appreciated, though.

“They’re just cables, they can handle a bit of rough treatment,” Daltos responds, with a pointed look.

Zylus suppresses the urge to glance his way and return it, screwing the cable in (and nearly losing the screw because of how hard he turns it). Out of the corner of his eye, he spies Daltos leaning to try to see the screen.

“Shouldn’t you be fixing the Stingray we picked up last week?” Zylus moves to the left so that Daltos doesn’t see all the diagnostic text BebopVox is sending him. It’s disguised as an electrical readout in one corner.

This monitor could have gone into the security room, being double the size of the last one. As for why it’s been reassigned to the living room, BebopVox merely wants Zylus to enjoy watching rom coms on a larger screen. Zylus can’t argue; BebopVox had been rather insistent, more so than usual.

“Yeah, or I could watch you fuck up that monitor.” Daltos is watching the screen now. Or would be, if his eyes hadn’t flicked up to Zylus’ face.

“I don’t need you to laugh at me if I do fuck up.” Zylus swallows a sigh.

There hasn’t been much distance between them, not since the fight. Every single time he thinks of it, his forehead scar tingles, and his thoughts drift to the tiny silver metal bar sitting in its matchbox. Its twin is still embedded in his forehead.

He regrets not taking up Lalnable’s offer to be rid of his former Dahl affiliation once and for all. One of these days, he should thank Daltos for taking the initiative for him. If that’s the case, then Zylus is not guilty, and BebopVox wants to be a real human.

“You sure?” Daltos drawls. His smug tone has Zylus gritting his teeth.

“I’m sure,” Zylus grounds out, mentally elbowing past the annoyance goading him to snap at Daltos. Next to Teep, Daltos is the only other person on Pandora who could aggravate him into losing his cool.

Zylus’ fingers feel under the lowest edge of the monitor. He finds and flicks the switch on. The screen fills with an abyss worthy black before giving way to a blue screen. A Tediore logo bounces from one side to the other. At least it didn’t explode in his face. Daltos would probably have a field day if that’d happened.

For now, Zylus connects it to his HUD. BebopVox now has a direct link to it, confirming it by sending out an experimental ping. He acknowledges it, spotting a notification in the lower corner of his HUD.

There’s a message from Ravs. Zylus is about to save it for later when without warning, a tsunami of images begin to pour out of the attached folder, like spilled water leaving a knocked over glass- his mouth falls open.

Every image is a security or grainy satellite photo of Daltos, filling the screen until the monitor’s background is no longer visible.

From across the room, Daltos spots what’s happening. It’s impossible to hide what he can see, thanks to the size of the monitor. Zylus rounds on him.

“It’s not what it-” He musters, stalling as his face begins its inevitable transition into redville.

“Obsessed, much?” Daltos lightly says, raising both eyebrows. He frowns, glancing past Zylus, like his HUD’s pinging him. That’s not possible, Zylus is still hanging onto his ECHO device. Daltos strides out, looking pissed.

Zylus can’t muster up a response. After ten seconds of wondering why he has the worst fucking friends, he fires a heated message to Ravs, covering his face with a hand.

“Bebop,  _ why _ did you open that in front of Daltos?” He mutters, relieved that Daltos isn’t sticking around to rub it in.

> I’m helping you deal with your attraction to him in the most direct way possible.

If BebopVox had used a tone of voice, it’d be earnest.

“That’s not helping at all!” Zylus responds, glaring at his ECHO device (which he  _ knows _ BebopVox has access to). His attempt is a pitiful one, on the account of his face still suffering its flaming red affliction.

> What is it that they say?

> That’s right, you can’t stop the gay.

> It is already here.

> I’ve also deduced that having a picture of your ‘crush’ is perfectly normal.

> By quantifying your level of attraction, this many pictures is to be expected.

Zylus doesn’t know where or how to begin explaining to BebopVox that this is  _ not _ okay, and he’s  _ not _ attracted to Daltos. It’s like BebopVox is one of those kids who asks when they’re getting married, except BebopVox should know better.

> I estimate a high chance of success if you take action!

> I’ve taken the liberty of providing several simulations, if you would kindly direct your attention to the monitor.

> This particular one has the highest probability of succeeding. 

> It takes into account both your respective moods, previous behaviour and current psychological profiles, with the best possible outcome.

Two figures pop up on the screen, one in formal Dahl uniform and the other in bandit gear. The figures are standing in the living room. The one in the Dahl uniform reaches over to drag the other one closer by the jacket, tilting their head - a single press of the monitor’s button flicks off the display. The screen retracts into a single grey dot. It blips out of existence.

> :(

> I’m only trying to help.

A surveyor drifts into the room to hover beside him, its eye trained on Zylus’ pink face.

“Bebop, stop.” Zylus lays a hand on top of the monitor. He feels a little guilty for cutting short BebopVox’s attempt to help him, never mind how it’s been a long time coming, these problems. This wouldn’t be happening if he’d had the guts and resolve to shoot Daltos in the head.

> Never.

He reaches over to pet the surveyor. Even if BebopVox can’t feel it, they let him. “You don’t have to waste processing power to calculate anything.”

> Not to ‘toot my own horn’, but I have more than enough processing power to run over five thousand simulations at once.

> These ones are merely ‘child’s play’.

> Why are you still hesitating?

> You two have talked it out.

> There’s no reason for you to not act.

> Seize the moment while it is ripe.

“It’s...complicated,” He mumbles, uneasy about saying it out loud. Daltos isn’t anywhere near to hear him ‘talking to himself’, but still. 

BebopVox doesn’t respond for exactly two minutes, perhaps readying encouragement or a plan of retreat. In spite of knowing BebopVox for so long, Zylus still doesn’t know how to predict half of their actions.

> I understand. Please choose your next action carefully.

Do they really understand? Zylus shakes his head, disconnecting the monitor from his HUD. The folder containing all the images of Daltos is left alone for now.

He could use some fresh air. The monitor on its trolley’s pushed to the edge of the room. BebopVox’s surveyor tails him like a skag pup imprinting on its elder.

Outside, the tail end of the storm is about to pass over the region. It leaves the sky blueless, causing the town to appear bleak and washed out like a hand woven cloth losing its vibrant dye job.

BebopVox helpfully forwards a storm warning. He acknowledges it and waves it away, sending back his thanks.

Leaving Sanctuary Hole early had been a wise decision before Daltos could pick a fight with Teep. Teep wouldn’t have shown any mercy, and neither would have Daltos. The brawl would have ended badly for both parties, and Lalnable had made his stance on fighting clear.

The incident prior to that is still on Zylus’ mind. He hopes that Rythian will be okay, then recalls that Zoeya, Teep and Ravs are looking after him. That eases his mind about feeling guilty in not being able to do much more than encourage Daltos’ cooperation.

_ Where _ are Nanosounds and Will Strife? 

Nobody dared to ask Rythian. Rythian’s forgotten a lot of things to save himself from well, himself. If Lalna’s betrayed him, he probably thinks Nanosounds and Will Strife had too. Any messages to the other two Vault Hunters got bounced; they all put it down to the storm knocking out the ECHOnet.

Near the Fast Travel Station building, Daltos is smoking. He’s standing at the landing platform, facing the edge of town.

Beyond the horizon, the sky progresses from a pale grey to a darker hue. The rising wind rattles all and any loose objects around town. Nearly all the Loaders move to secure them, shuttling them into the garage and other buildings out of the incoming rain.

“What’s wrong?” Zylus inquires, dodging a burdened Loader carrying a detached technical engine. 

Once upon a time, he would have reached out to him with a hand. These days, he keeps his distance, and his hands to himself. After that one night (and the next, and the next, and so on), he can’t trust himself not to resist the temptation.

“Nothing,” Daltos says with a scowl.

His boot heel grinds the cigarette until it’s reduced to a buckled lump of grey ash and a bright yellow stub. The disgruntled gesture is familiar to Zylus. It indicates unhappiness or impatience. It’s rare when it’s something else. This is one of those times.

“It can’t be ‘nothing’ if you're smoking,” Zylus points out. 

The earthen smell of rain’s nearly invisible under the dusty one that’s typical in T-Bone Junction. A rarity, storms are both a blessing and a curse out in these parts.

“You really want to know?” Irritation creeps into Daltos’ expression. He give Zylus a look saying as much.

“We can talk about whatever’s bothering you,” Zylus patiently reminds. Daltos had better not be running out of smokes again; it’s an hour’s trip to the nearest gas station for them if the vending machines  in town have run out.

Daltos lets out a held breath, folding his arms over his chest. “Was thinking about what what you said about me helping you and the Vault Hunters.”

“You did help.” Zylus watches him, not sure where this is headed. In the nick of time, he stops himself from adding ‘and I’m proud of you’ onto that. “You can stop helping if you want, but I’m going to do as much as I can.”

Rythian needs all the help he can get, and while Zylus isn’t as worried about the Vaults (they can’t be that bad, right?), he’s doing this for him as a longtime friend. It’s also clearly important to Rythian. That’s good enough for Zylus.

Daltos doesn’t have any personal stakes in the matter; or at least, none that Zylus is aware of. There’s a lot he’s not aware of, regarding him (and his association with SipsCo., but Zylus isn’t going to harass him for an explanation if it’s not critical).

After Zylus says that, Daltos’ irritation fades to contemplation. “Nothing yet?”

“No. I’ll check back in a few hours. Come on, let’s go inside before the storm arrives.” Zylus turns to him as they both head along the main street back to Zylus’ humble abode. 

“Alright.”

For lack of any other conversational topic, Zylus decides to ask a bigger question, “What do you think about Lalna backstabbing Rythian?”

The shield overhead spawns into place. Loaders begin to take shelter, folding up in the garage to hide from a machine’s worst nightmare: the rain. The last time BebopVox left a Loader to wander beyond the town’s boundaries, it’d exploded thanks to a stray lightning bolt. They hadn’t repeated the experiment since.

Surveyors and workerbots fly in to roost in their charging stations sprawling across the rooftops like misshapen, boxy nests. Two land on top of each other, like rakks curling up for warmth.

All around them, thunder rumbles at the foundations beneath their feet. Lightning scorches the sky above their heads, leaving molten wisps against the clouds.

T-Bone Junction’s street lamps flicker before BebopVox shuts them off to avoid blowing up the backup generators. Rain whispers against the shield, distorted and relentless. The town becomes a lost oasis in the churning desert sands.

When it’s a pleasant day, BebopVox lowers the shield every now and again to let air flow through the town. For the moment, wind drums against the transparent field. It ripples, making Zylus feel like he’s standing far below the ocean surface, staring out through an upturned glass bowl. He sleeps easier on these nights.

“Lalna had his reasons, however shit they were,” Daltos eventually says, after a brief silence.

“Did he really?” Zylus pushes open the front door. Daltos catches it as it swings towards him, holding it open for Zylus before slipping inside as well.

“To be honest?” Daltos pauses to scoff, the door clicking shut. “He would have done it anyway.”

Back on the frigate, trapped in the airlock with the Vault Hunters, Daltos hadn’t been able to do much else except for endure. His heart had been spasming, thumping erratically in uneven bursts, making his chest flutter with pain. Next to being hit with shrapnel, that was almost as bad.

In his gut, he’d known that he wouldn’t die; the Vault Hunters could have killed him in the meeting room. That told him that they wanted him alive. The Vault Hunters had better leave before Arsenal arrived and complicated everything. 

In the background, Arado and Gotha coordinated an attack on the airlock door, with much muffled shouting, cursing and bellowing. Will flinched, drawing away from the door, as with his two other companions.

Remaining in front of his accursed, gaudily pink and green colored Loader, Lalna stood quietly. His emotions broadcasted through the explicitly stricken expression on his face. He’d lifted his head to look right at Daltos.

Daltos had been  _ very _ interested in how Lalna’s hands had twitched, hesitantly rising to untie the cloth keeping him prisoner.

In Lalna’s troubled eyes, he saw it so clearly: the desperate, crazed fear that nearly made Lalna set him free to slaughter Rythian, Will Strife and Nanosounds. Only the sudden awareness of what he’d been about to do saved his three fellow Vault Hunters (and himself) a nasty fate.

How nobody else had picked up on it endlessly baffles Daltos. It’s the same gaze all his backstabbers possessed, wanting something so badly that they were willing to sink to a new level of despicable behavior to obtain it. 

Maybe all Vault Hunters couldn’t help naively trusting each other;  _ idiots _ , all of them.

No wonder why nearly all the Vault Hunters died out during Hyperion’s reign. They all turned on each other in their bid to claim Hyperion’s reward, only to get gunned down. A smart remaining few (like Teep and Ravs) sensed the changing wind, cutting ties and going underground.

Daltos had simply told the snobbish Hyperion stooge ‘nope, haven’t seen any seen Vault Hunters around lately’, which was technically the truth. He hadn’t seen Ravs after Ravs requested all his dynamite (which Arsenal handed over without hesitation).

Arsenal hadn’t been inclined to give away Teep’s whereabouts either. Minty straight up executed any Hyperion busybodies asking for their turf back, sending all the corpses packaged in an icebox (which made Arsenal ridiculously proud), until Hyperion got the message and tried to bomb Concordia instead.

Thanks to her warning, Daltos maintained air patrols at all hours to prevent Hyperion fighters sneaking up on his vulnerable frigate. Sure enough, they found out the hard way that Daltos kept the frigate’s missile turrets in excellent condition.

Hawker, Hurricane, Donier and the other Buzzard units proudly hung up the salvaged fighter wreckages on the walls of their airlocks and hangers.

It said a lot about how much Hyperion cared when not even a single Loader turned up to ask for the messenger’s corpse back. Cant probably still had the Hyperion agent’s smashed in and bullet riddled skull stashed somewhere. Daltos hoped to add Lalna’s head to that hoard someday.

If Lalna’s looking for peace of mind, he’s not going to find it by torturing himself over a guilty conscience for killing people. One quickly learned to get comfortable with it fast, or not at all.

In fact, Daltos been surprised that Lalna hadn’t broken ties with the Vault Hunters sooner (or in a less painful manner). What’d finally driven Lalna over the edge? This has Sjin’s involvement written all over it.

Daltos reminds himself to cut ties with the bastard as soon as he gets the chance. 

Besides, Arsenal’s last update notes that Arado’s conquered his paranoid fear of traps, and is spearheading many of the campaigns on the west coast. Good for him, but where’s all that new confidence coming from? 

When Daltos gets back, he and Arado are going to sit the fuck down and have a nice, civilized talk about whose gang it really is.

“How do you know Lalna would have done it anyway?” Zylus might not have known Lalna for very long, so the shock of his betrayal doesn’t hit him as hard as it did for Rythian. It still hurt. Betraying Rythian’s as good as betraying those who know him.

“Maybe you didn’t know him at all!”

“You don’t know him like I do!”

In Zylus’ eyes, Lalna hadn’t  _ looked _ that capable of betrayal. Someone or something must have coerced him, because any other hypothesis hurts to think about. Zylus understands what he’s going through, driven to such desperation that any option to save himself will do, no matter the means involved.

“Look, I could see that backstab coming from  _ Elpis _ ,” Daltos retorts. The two of them are currently in the hallway, almost to the living room. “It doesn’t matter how well you think you know him, he still did it. Betrayal’s betrayal.”

For that, Zylus feels obliged to defend Lalna from Daltos’ hypocritical judgement. As he rounds on him, he snaps back, “Like you’re one to talk!”

Daltos nearly walks right into him. “You fucking take that back.” Daltos glares at him, which Zylus gladly returns.

“Only if you lay off Lalna!”

“Fuck that, it doesn’t change that the fuckwit made a bad decision!” Daltos’ glare intensifies. Zylus is too used to it to not back down.

“It wasn’t the worst one he’s made so far!” Zylus’ hands ball into fists. He forces himself to relax, reminding himself that Daltos is only winding him up to make his point known.

The worst part might have been leaving Rythian for dead, which is an effective relationship wrecker. It’s too familiar, this feeling of broken trust. All it tells Zylus is that nobody’s immune. Before he can add that, Daltos is already launching a counter argument.

“ _ Hello _ , Zylus, what part of ‘stole a dangerous Vault Key’ and ‘nearly killed his closest buddy to do it’, don’t you get?” Daltos throws a hand out at the nearest window, as though the Vault is right outside. 

He doesn’t have to add that they all might be fucked because of Lalna’s decision. Lalna will get no sympathy from him, not unless he makes it up to Rythian. Zylus is going  _ soft _ to defend him.

“Daltos, you did the same thing!” Zylus snaps, stepping until he’s a punch away from Daltos. Why is Daltos being so hypocritical? He has no  _ right _ to judge Lalna, especially not after-

“Don’t you  _ dare _ compare us!” Daltos snaps back, mirroring his step forward.

Why is Zylus sticking up for Lalna when he should know better? He should be full of hate, not  _ sympathy _ , unless he’s still feeling guilty (and Daltos is too, but)-

“I might as well! You two don’t care about what happens to the people you hurt once you’ve gotten what you wanted!”

“I never said I didn’t care-”

“You didn’t care when you pulled the trigger!”

Their voices echo in the hallway, fleeing the scene. For a few moments, there’s just the ragged sound of chests heaving. The two of them take a series of deep, calming breaths, keenly aware of how they’ve fallen into that old trap of saying shit that they don’t mean again.

Daltos drops the glare first, murmuring, “Backstabbing you wasn’t the worst decision of my life.” In a barely restrained, level tone, he says, “At least I have the guts to own up. I can’t see Lalna doing that.  _ That’s _ why you can’t compare us.”

For a few surreal seconds, Zylus can’t believe what he’s hearing. Hands planted on his hips, he grounds out without missing a beat, “ _ Fine _ , what’s the worst decision you’ve ever made,  _ aside _ from stranding us on Pandora?”

Judging by the flash of anger in Daltos’ eyes, he thinks Zylus just did  _ not _ go there. Zylus tilts his chin up, indicating that he just fucking did and isn’t regretting it.

“You’re  _ asking _ about the  _ worst _ decision of my life?” When Daltos laughs, it’s full of bitterness, spite and whatever else that fuels his constant need to twist all of Zylus’ words. Zylus has never heard him use a malicious voice so soft that he has to strain to hear it. “ _ Fine _ . The  _ worst _ decision of my life, was  _ dating you _ .”

It’s so easy to fall back into old patterns when fighting, aiming to deal a fatal blow, tearing away at each other until one or the both of them had enough until words aren’t simply enough to damage.

Because it’s Zylus, he drags Daltos down with him, and Daltos understands that so perfectly that Zylus briefly wonders if this is  _ normal _ , if other people fought like this and substituted hate for every other feeling, or vice versa and twisted it out of shape to fit whatever definition that pleased them.

He wouldn’t recognize love for what it is, not after what he’s been through. That’s fine, Daltos didn’t either.

If he does, he’s atrocious at showing it.

(“Still want me?”

“ _ Yes _ .”)

The spoken words reverberate down the hall, slipping through the cracks to join all the others in hiding.

Zylus says nothing ( _ has _ nothing, to say). His glare fades to plain shock. The shock transitions to a pain so raw that it must have always been there inside of him, lurking, until the day it became too much for him to completely block out with willpower alone.

(Stop crying in your sleep, they’re only  _ dreams _ .)

Daltos immediately knows that he shouldn’t have said that- he hadn’t meant, somehow, the words had just escaped from the place where he keeps everything that goes unsaid. Everyone nurtured one.

For the first time in both their lives, they’d both been  _ happy _ even as their tiny, self-contained universe began to fall apart, starting with the frigate’s horrifying mutiny and when upper command abandoned them to fend for themselves.

Zylus takes a step back. By the time Daltos has stepped forward, a hand raised to grab his arm to tell him that he didn’t mean it, Zylus has bolted out the front door.

He’d always been good at running, even when cornered.

The full force of the storm is upon T-Bone Junction. Rain slams the door open and shut, open and shut, wind playing with the squeaking hinges that Zylus had never gotten around to oiling.

Left behind is this dreadful, hurt silence that cuts at Daltos like a hundred exploding pieces of shrapnel from Zylus’ absence.

Lowering his outstretched hand, Daltos sprints outside. The door slams behind him. When he looks left and right, Zylus is nowhere to be found.

“Zylus!” The shouted name is slapped down by the pouring rain.

There’s no way to tell which direction Zylus ran off in. He can’t have gone far. Nothing comes up on the radar, rain causing interference with the initial scans.

Desperate, Daltos looks up at the security camera clinging to an electricity pole resisting the pushy winds. It’s watching him, as always.

Cold water lashes his vision. It forces him to hold a hand up to protect his eyes to see where he’s going. It’s soaking through his clothes and pressing down on his hair, dripping down his face and body. His boots kick up rushing brown foam from the flooded drains, the streets buried under the overflowing grates.

Still he persists.

Just around the corner, he finds a Loader readjusting a rapidly filling water tank. Daltos intercepts the machine by sliding in front of it. The Loader creaks to a sudden halt, water coating it in a sheen that’ll leave it sparkling new. The ragged red umbrella in its free hand is battered this way and that by the rushing wind.

It’s time for Daltos to break the tacit agreement between him and BebopVox.

Arguing’s reduced his voice to a rough, low rasping one. “BebopVox, where’s Zylus?”

The Loader takes a second longer than usual to respond. Water sloshes out of a leaking pipe all over its arm. BebopVox is hesitating to tell him where Zylus vanished to, with good reason.

Daltos wouldn’t have trusted himself either if he’d been in BebopVox’s position. He turns, thinking of where Zylus might have gotten to.

A string of coordinates fills his HUD. Muttering his thanks, Daltos follows the ghost of Zylus’ trail through T-Bone Junction, ending up at one of the roads leading out of town. This is where Lalnable met up with him and Zylus.

At the bus stop, there’s Zylus, shivering under the corrugated metal sheet serving as the stop’s roof. With both arms crossed over his chest, Zylus is trying his best to huddle away from the rain, to shrink himself so the world can’t hurt him anymore.

Daltos slows his walk.

In a town as small as this, there’s nowhere for the two of them to go, to run, even when they need to put as much space as possible between each other. It doesn’t take long for the other to catch up when gravity spins them back into orbit around one another, even if they loathe every single second of it.

When Daltos approaches, Zyus doesn’t take his hollow gaze off the ground. A long time ago, Daltos realised that Zylus subconsciously does that when he’s thinking, or when he doesn’t know what to do. Drops steadily plip off his bedraggled form, onto the concrete.

“Zylus,” Daltos calls out, in a voice so quiet that it nearly becomes part of the falling rain. He makes it to Zylus without him fleeing again.

Zylus blinks. He takes a deep, shuddering breath that makes his whole body rattle from the inside. When he speaks, his voice shakes, like every word’s costing him something to say out loud. “You can leave this town, if you want. I won’t stop you.”

He can’t even bear to look directly at Daltos.

The shield above them has long since parted. From the second Zylus left the building, BebopVox hadn’t wanted to, but Zylus relayed only two words: Bebop,  _ please _ .

Daltos remains rooted to the spot, merely watching. Zylus’ gaze snaps to him. His eyes have shed their hollow look, allowing Daltos a glimpse of the wild, roiling mess of emotion underneath, forming its own malevolent storm inside of Zylus.

“What are you waiting for?” His voice rises to a shout, his words scattering into the wind from the force of his anger. “Just go already!”

A slight jerk of his head indicates the highway beside him. When Daltos still doesn’t budge, Zylus lunges at him. 

Tensing up, Daltos expects a blow that he’s not going to defend against. He doesn’t expect hands on his shoulders, shoving him towards the road.

Zylus doesn’t have to be gentle about it, his fingers digging in until nails bite against the outlines of solid bone and sinewy muscle. They both know from first-hand experience that Daltos can handle rough treatment. Any gentleness is purged like it doesn’t fit.

Daltos digs his heels in to resist, Zylus trying his hardest to force him to go. This is a horrible parody of that one time Zylus had tried to help him clean his burns in the bathroom, where he didn’t want any help, and Zylus had spent weeks despairing over him possibly dying.

All Daltos says is, “No.”

Upon hearing him speak, Zylus’ hands plummet. He can’t see Daltos’ face, can’t imagine what his expression is, can’t fathom why he’d want to to  _ stay _ when he’d been so eager to leave (or maybe that’s just wishful thinking on his part).

Both hands settle in the small of Daltos’ back. All his fingers curl against the damp material of the navy jacket, the stitched, patchy blue being all that Zylus can see (he’d seen Daltos stubbornly fixing it a couple times, when it’d have been easier to toss it out and wear a new one).

They are both going to get sick standing out here in the rain like this. Zylus doubts either of them care, at the moment. Lightning strikes wouldn’t have moved either of them, burdened by the collective weight of everything that’s happened so far, up until this point.

This is it. He’s done for. He’s finished.

His forehead comes to rest on Daltos’ back, feeling, listening and hearing Daltos breathe.

The two of them both know the real reason why he won’t leave, and it has nothing to do with retrieving BebopVox.

Zylus can’t help the tears when they start. He fucking  _ despises _ how he’s so emotional, unable to stick to one feeling before trading it in for another that’s just as intense wherever the fickle wind so much as shifts by a few degrees.

Day in, day out, the very act of existing is a wound that won’t heal because it shouldn’t hurt like  _ this _ . It’s how he ends up curled up on his bed for a week, numbly staring at the wall and wishing that he had the strength to pick up his gun off the floor.

When Daltos arrived, Zylus put those days behind him; he found other ways to cope, spurred into action rather than falling into inaction for the thousandth time. Those days are over.

Right now, he’s conflicted about what to do. Does he force Daltos to leave, or ask him to stay? Zylus doesn’t know what he  _ wants _ and it’s  _ killing _ him.

Meanwhile, Daltos lets him cry his heart out, the lines of his back stoic. The eventual turn of his body forces Zylus to release his hold on him, gravity folding his trembling hands along his sides.

Sirens, Zylus  _ hates _ him so fucking much, but even if he does, he doesn’t want him to  _ leave _ like this, it’s the fucking frigate all over again. He doesn’t want to be alone again.

A gloved hand finds his own, palm settling against palm. The gesture spikes an acute pain that stabs him in the ribs. The gentlest tug encourages him to move. Inertia broken, Zylus lets himself be led home by Daltos.

Home is where they’re both miserable but it’s all they have left. There’s nothing else that they can possibly rip away from or out of each other, short of killing themselves.

In their wake, a slick river of water forms along the hallway, marking their journey to the bathroom. The hand guiding his own slips out of his, leaving him stranded.

He’s vaguely aware of Daltos leaning over to turn the light on, filling the room with a bright glow that glances off practically everything compared to the overcast and flooded scenery outside.

Zylus doesn’t even try to lock the door when Daltos leaves. He’s still crying, abandoned by the lone wooden chair that’d taken up residence by the sink.

It’s a sobering remnant of when Daltos had stolen it from the kitchen. Logical reasoning had led Zylus to deduce that it’s so he could clean his burns without having to resort to sitting on the tiled floor. 

The chair’s become a permanent fixture in the bathroom, one of the tiny, significant changes marking an adjustment to the overlapping ones in their lives.

Lacking the strength he needs to take a single step towards the chair, Zylus sinks onto the floor.

The tiled wall at his back stops him from sliding down onto his side. Wrapping his arms around his knees, Zylus tries unsuccessfully to fold himself up. His uniform is soaked through completely.

The violent shivering still hasn’t abated. Zylus  _ knows _ that he has to undress, but is also perfectly willing to suffer if it means not having to deal with the current mess that’s his life and feelings. It hurts so fucking much, as much as the day he felt that ricocheting bullet scrape over his eyelid and changed their lives forever.

A soft knock at the ajar door announces Daltos’ return. Footsteps add to the trickling water filtering through the tile’s cracks towards the floor drain.

He drops off a folded set of dry and clean clothes on the rack by the shower, tucking them in so that they don’t slip off. Daltos keeps the bath towel he’d carried in with him. 

Zylus still doesn’t react when Daltos settles cross-legged on the dry part of the floor in front of him.

A bare hand reaches up to his face. Zylus barely registers it dislodging the monocle, fingers keeping clear of the smooth, dust particle ridden glass. It almost brushes over the old scars of their biggest fight.

Without the monocle in place, his right eye fuzzes over. It’s even blurrier because of the tears still running down his face. The monocle is left to dry by the sink.

The towel’s draped over Zylus’ bent head. Not expecting that, Zylus exhales so sharply, snapping his eyes shut so he doesn’t have to look at Daltos. What he can’t ignore are Daltos’ hands, massaging the towel over damp, sandy brown curls, drying off Zylus’ hair for him.

It’s not life-shattering to realise at this point that Daltos is capable of a tender gesture. It’s just, Zylus has gone for so long without it that he’s forgotten what it’d felt like. For Daltos to fix that makes it significant in a way that it shouldn’t be.

Zylus hates how nice it feels, to have someone dry his hair for him. His body’s no longer so tense that he might snap at any second, relaxing to mirror the way Daltos is sitting.

When Zylus brings himself to open his eyes, his gaze drifts over to the towel rack. Daltos hadn’t bothered to grab any dry clothes for himself, not even a towel.

His eyes flick back to Daltos. For the first time since Zylus reunited with him, he looks the faintest bit guilty. Their gazes meet.

Every single scrap of internalised resentment, every volatile, random mood swing ever felt because of  _ him _ , every violent, soul crushing thought that’s gone through his mind about grabbing a pillow and holding it down over Daltos’ face in the middle of the night, it’s all forcibly poured into his words like the final blow to a weapon tempered for a decade, and it’s swung.

“I  _ hate _ you,” Zylus breathes.

Daltos stiffens. His hands freeze where they are, on either side of Zylus’ head. Zylus relishes the resulting, split second of satisfaction. His callous gaze never leaves Daltos’ face. That satisfaction is dashed when Daltos merely nods.

He picks up where he’d left off, rubbing soothing circles with the towel, fingers chasing after any lingering raindrops hiding in Zylus’ short hair.

Once water’s no longer dripping down Zylus’ face and head, Daltos rises. The towel’s left hanging on the rack besides the other one (his). When Zylus hears the bathroom door locking as it closes, only then does he stumble to his feet. 

His modules land by the monocle, forming their own puddles by the sink. Struggling out of his drenched uniform and boots, Zylus flings it all into a sodden heap on the floor. With a hand, he wrenches the shower door back and steps in.

It’s longest hot shower of his entire life. He’s knowingly burning through an hour’s worth of water, but he doesn’t give a shit. He lets the water run over him, head tilted up so that it can purge the lingering traces of Daltos’ hands.

What Zylus wishes is that he could do the same for the inside of his mind.

He finishes what Daltos started, his mind and heart quieting to dull thuds, slightly out of sync and leaving him exhausted that it takes every last bit of energy he has not to pass out onto the bathroom floor.

Making one last effort, he shuts off the water and changes into the clothes left out for him. Leaving a mess in the bathroom, he heads straight for the bedroom. The other towel dries on the rack besides its twin. His monocle and digistruct modules are dropped off at the bedside table, skidding to a halt by the drooping wire lamp.

There’s one last thing he has to do first. Zylus conducts a room by room search. Daltos isn’t in the bedroom, the kitchen or living room.

Unable to find him, Zylus resigns himself to curling up on the bed under the sheets. Pulses of crackling lightning in the dark room make the blinds flare. The drumming of clouds emptying rain upon T-Bone Junction adds a surreal, faraway mood to his own, blank one.

BebopVox sends in a lone, half-repaired surveyor to hover by the bed, which he absently pats. It sheds height to land, shimmying about on wings until it’s under the sheets. It’s keeping him company (but it’s not the same).

For the first time in months, Zylus doesn’t care if Daltos is well and truly gone. His last thoughts, before he sinks into sleep, are of missing the blue of that jacket, and how it felt to tug it off Daltos’ shoulders.

\--

The replacement Fast Travel Station isn’t like any of the other models that Zylus has ever seen before. For one, it’s less bulkier than all the other machines Hyperion manufactures. This makes it easy to hoist it into the back of the technical.

When Zylus ran his hands over it, the dark grey chassis is almost practically scar free. The rest of it is also in unusually good condition, including the insides.

Finding it in the junkyard made Zylus’ whole day. Daltos treats it like it’s a useless piece of junk, as he tends to do with everything Zylus brings back to T-Bone Junction.

Of course, Zylus ignores his pointless criticisms. Like everybody else, Daltos despises Hyperion. Zylus does too. It’s one of the few things that they can share without turning it into an argument.

The difference between his hate and Daltos’ is that it focuses on how Hyperion leaves a giant mess behind wherever they go (like the events on Elpis), rather than how their ‘eradicate all bandits’ campaign resulted in the company’s CEO dying in the middle of nowhere.

Privately, Zylus wishes Hyperion had wiped out more bandits so that he’s not harassed whenever he wants to track down spare parts. He also wonders how Daltos held out against Hyperion after all this time.

“Put it back where you got it,” Daltos insists, for the umptenth time as he and Zylus enter the garage.

The Loader lugging said machine upright watches the two of them with a narrowed blue eye. Whenever they get the chance, BebopVox collects data, and Zylus knows how they can’t pass up the compulsion. He can’t just shoo BebopVox out or else they’ll take offence (unlikely, but Zylus thinks of BebopVox as having feelings as well).

“Like you?” Zylus retorts, dragging a few power cables over. The ones Daltos brought in earlier are already proving useful.

The instant change from easygoing to suspenseful tension makes Zylus thinks that Daltos is going to get offended and leave. Instead, what he gets is an incredibly amused, soft sound like Daltos is trying not to laugh.

Hearing it, Zylus has to focus on keeping his hands steady. The last thing he needs to do is to overload the new Fast Travel Station. Daltos will never let him forget it if that happens.

“Very funny.” Daltos stops chuckling. “But seriously, I don’t trust it.”

“It’s just a Fast Travel Station that nobody wants anymore.” Zylus shakes his head. It might not look like any of the other ones, but it’d be a waste to let it go to waste purely on some bad feeling. “Hyperion made doesn’t mean inherently bad.” 

Few people used Hyperion made guns (Teep being one of them, preferring to nick the parts instead to pawn off). Zylus prefers a healthy balance of other brands, noting Daltos chooses Bandit and Dahl over the rest.

“Nature made skags, but I don’t see people going out of their way to be nicer to them.”

“It’ll be  _ fine _ ,” Zylus sighs. The cables plug in without a hitch, a small mercy that Zylus is grateful for.

Daltos makes a scoffing noise. “Yeah, sure, until you Fast Travel and then go missing when the connection shits itself.”

“Those are just stories! Nobody’s ever really gone missing.”

“That’s just what they want you to believe.”

“We’re not arguing about this,” Zylus says, with more patience than is really necessary.

“Only because you know that I’m right.” He doesn’t have to turn around to see how smug Daltos is being. Ignoring him, Zylus bites back another retort, straightening out the cables trailing haphazardly all over the floor.

Straightening up, he flicks the jury-rigged power switch on the bench. Nothing happens. Zylus flicks the switch back to off, then on, giving it a second between the reset. Daltos snickers when nothing still happens.

“Great, I fixed it up for nothing.” Zylus heaves a frustrated sigh, rubbing at his left eye with the palm of his hand.

“You’re a hoarder, Zylus. Maybe this is why you shouldn’t bring home useless junk.” It’s a very pointed tone that Daltos is using. It is also  _ annoying. _

“I can scavenge the digistruct modules.” Zylus refuses to admit that he’s completely lost in dragging that machine several miles back home. It has to be worth  _ something, _ if only to avoid Daltos gloating.

“I bet those are broken too.”

“Don’t fucking jinx it.” Zylus unscrews the panels covering the innards, lowering each piece of metal plating to the floor.

Goodbye warranty, and hello shiny new modules. They don’t make digistruct modules this large anymore, not without slapping a hideous price tag on it.

The modules housed inside are brand new, intact and are simply asking to be pried out and recycled. It makes up for the rest of the machine not working. He doesn’t know what they’ll be used for, yet.

Proving helpful (for once), Daltos hands him a couple of extra tools. Zylus moves to disconnect the cables linking the modules to the rest of the machine. When Daltos notices him hesitating, he drifts over to peer over a shoulder.

“Don’t tell me I was right.”

“No, look.” Zylus points with the screwdriver. “I’ve never seen that kind of scanner before.”

“Now why would a Fast Travel machine have such an advanced biometric scanner?” 

When Daltos is standing this close, Zylus has to fight the reflex to glance sideways at him. The garage door’s rollers creak as BebopVox steers their Loader outside to deal with another chore. BebopVox had better not be thinking that privacy is needed.

“Maybe it’s an upgrade,” Zylus speculates. “It is a pretty new machine.”

“Then it doesn’t make any sense for anybody to toss it out, not unless it never worked in the first place.” Daltos takes the screwdriver off him. “Do you want it?”

“It might be useful.”

“Zylus the hoarder strikes again.” Daltos gets the screwdriver aligned, carefully taking the scanner off as Zylus readies, holding his hands underneath. “Catch!”

“Daltos, I am not a hoarder!” The scanner’s pried loose with a hideous screech that makes his eardrums regret existing for five seconds. Zylus catches it a metre off the floor.

He hefts it up in both hands. It’s about as heavy as a bulky encyclopedia, still attached to the machine by a series of fraying, rusty wires held together with canary yellow duct tape. It’s almost untouched by dust, strangely so.

“Admitting that you have a problem’s the first step to recovery,” Daltos deadpans.

Zylus chooses to employ selective hearing. He could have pointed out Daltos’ smoking habit, and for his concern, gotten into another argument about it when Daltos inevitably brings up Zylus’ hoarding.

“This might go for a lot.” Pyrionflax might even buy it outright for the folks on Elpis. Stuff on Elpis is always breaking down. A scanner’s one of the harder finds without resorting to having it shipped in from offworld. Prices fluctuate depending on which corporations are fighting each other.

“It’d better, especially after all that effort we went to bring it back.” Daltos taps the scanner with a gloved finger, inspecting it. “Or, you could keep it,” He proposes.

“For what?” Zylus could use it by rigging it up to a monitor. He has plenty of those lying about.

“If you’re ever curious about your heartbeat, weight, height and all that.” Daltos shrugs, tossing the screwdriver up and down in one hand. It spins, the handle tipping over to be caught a second later. “But we all know that I’ll be taller than you, no matter what.”

“You’re only a centimetre taller than me. That’s hardly anything!” Zylus is indignant, and forever will be, over Daltos gaining a mere centimetre over him in the time that they’d split.

“It’s alright, I’ll still get the stuff off the highest shelves for you,” Daltos says, grinning. The screwdriver he’d been tossing’s lobbed back into the open toolbox.

Grinning too, Zylus smacks him in the arm. “No wonder why this didn’t work, it’s not hooked in right.” With a bit of fiddling, he restores the connections to the right plugs. 

Still, nothing. That is, until Zylus raises a hand to slap it, irritated that it’s not doing what it’s supposed to.

With a rattle, the scanner expands like a satellite dish, lighting up. It grabs the both of them in a pale blue beam that sweeps across the whole garage. The two of them freeze as the machine it’s linked to begins to hum, all the panels unfolding to either side like it’s preparing to Fast Travel the both of them.

“Turn it off!” It’s not like Daltos to sound so alarmed at the sight. A gloved hand’s resting on top of his belt, where his digistruct module would have been.

Zylus lunges for the kill switch and doesn’t make it, falling with a crash of metal and sparking wires. A few snap against the garage floor, flailing at the wall. The scanner in his hand’s still attached to the machine, hanging on by a thread. 

Daltos kneels to help him up. The two watch the machine with wide eyes, the main mechanism whirring faster and faster until light fills the room.

The rattling Fast Travel Station digistructs two people, the blue light building up the bodies. Two sets of boots hit the floor. The two digistructed people straighten up, stretching.

Daltos and Zylus stare at themselves.

“Thank you for using the New U…” The machine chirps.

Zylus leans across and finally flicks off the power switch. The pre-recorded spiel is silenced. 

From his hand, the biometric scanner drops when he scrambles to his feet. His other self backs away, looking just as confused as he feels. The scanner hits the floor without breaking.

“Well,  _ shit _ ,” Daltos and his other self say, at the same time. It sounds like an eerie echo, both voices echoing in the garage’s bulky interior. Compared to both Zylus’ reactions, the two of them warily drift forwards to engage.

“Wait.” Zylus grabs hold of (his) Daltos’ arm. He rummages in his inventory, pulling out Daltos’ confiscated digistruct modules. Daltos takes them and clips them onto his belt, not taking his eyes off his counterpart.

“Why does  _ he _ get his modules back?” The other Daltos observes with the surliest scowl possible.

“Because we’re not sure what or who you are, yet,” Daltos slowly says. Every physical detail is identical, from the strands of grey in his hair to the the long faded scar from Ravs on his cheek.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Other Daltos rolls his eyes, his words full of biting sarcasm. “I’m  _ you _ .” He turns to the other Zylus with an eyeroll, full of equally sarcastic cheer. “Hey, was I always this stupid?”

Before Zylus can stop him, Daltos tugs out of his grip to punch himself in the face. His other self reels back with a pained grunt. 

“There, now we can tell the difference.” Daltos flicks out his folded hand like the punch had hurt him too.

“I could have just wrote ‘not Daltos’ on my head in marker, but that’ll do too,” Other Daltos dryly notes. He returns the punch, which Daltos takes standing up. The two of them rub at their faces, eyeing each other up with growing hostility.

Zylus is hoping that this won’t end in a brawl, because he’s not sure if he can separate the two without help from his other self or BebopVox.

“Yep, that’s me alright. Wow, do I really hit that hard?” Daltos concludes, sounding proud.

“Yeah, you do.” Other Daltos takes his hand away from his face, the skin there turning the colour of bruised sunfruit.

Zylus’ other self looks like he’s ready to make a break for it, edging towards the door. Spotting him, Zylus blocks off the route to the garage exit. “Hey, what’s the last thing you remember?” It’s  _ weird _ , addressing himself like this.

“Um.” His other self flinches when he’s spoken to, empty hands fiddling with his frayed sleeves. A meek point indicates the Fast Travel Station. “Standing over there, holding the scanner.”

“And then?” Zylus kindly prompts. Does he always look this skittish? He’s finally getting why people want to take care of him.

“I think I died.” Other Zylus spreads his empty hands, the very picture of guilt and helplessness. “All I remember is this awful, suffocating feeling in my chest, a bit like those breathing attacks and the next thing I knew, I was standing in the garage with well,  _ him _ . Your garage, I mean.” He folds his hands together, staring hard at the grease and oil stained floor.

The two of them look up to see Daltos and his counterpart dismantling the aforementioned machine. “Hey!” Zylus moves around the benches in the way. “What’re you doing?”

“Getting rid of this thing before it makes more copies of us,” Daltos says, tossing aside the disconnected power cables.

“Oh. That’s a pretty good idea, actually.” Zylus watches Daltos’ other self raise an eyebrow, prying off the modules with a crowbar.

“Here’s your modules.” Other Daltos hands Zylus the ripped off, intact grey sections of encased blue.

Zylus ditches them on the crowded worktable. “Thanks.”

“This is really fucking weird.” Daltos shakes his head, watching himself with an interest that Zylus can’t place. “Do I always sound this nice?” This question is addressed to Zylus and his counterpart.

The two merely walk out instead of responding, to both Daltos’ laughter.

Back in his home, Zylus makes the two of them coffee. He watches himself cradle the ‘#1 DAD’ mug in both hands, staring at the way the steam drifts up from the brown liquid.

The mug was a Mercenary Day gift from Ravs. Being too polite, Zylus hadn’t asked for the reasoning behind such a bizarre gift. He’s not a dad yet. Well, he could always use more mugs (even if Daltos complains that he already has ten of them for no reason; there’s no way to predict when Zylus will have  _ guests _ , okay?).

“I know I’m not supposed to be here,” Other Zylus mumbles, looking so self-conscious that it elicits such a familiar pang of sympathy.

“It’s fine,” Zylus automatically reassures, pushing a smile onto his face. “If anybody drops by, we’ll just have to hide you and other Daltos.”

Other Zylus quickly looks up, then back down. He merely nods, blindly accepting the reassurance. Had he always been this quiet, this constantly distracted? Melancholy, that’s the word, like he wants something that will always be out of his reach.

Ravs always said that Zylus’ smile could fuel a sun, whenever he did smile (and he has to sigh and push that thought out of his mind, because Ravs’ compliments, no matter how genuine they sound, must be out of jest). This must be what people see when they look at him.

He should do something about the five day old stubble. It makes him look a few years older. He’s never been able to pull it off like Daltos has- Daltos leads his other self into the kitchen, the two of them not saying a word to each other.

Zylus watches the two go for the exact same mug, the blue one with the chipped handle resting upside-down in the drainer. Both their hands collide.

There’s a pregnant pause where Daltos steadily regards himself. Zylus rises, about to pull them apart, when the Daltos not wearing the modules shrugs, taking a different (also blue) mug.

The two dole out exactly the same amount of coffee. Even the amount of sugar going in doesn’t change, or the way the spoon mixes it in (exactly five full swirls, all clockwise).

Coffee in hand, Daltos sits across from himself besides Zylus. “So, any ideas on how this happened?” He casually asks.

Other Daltos takes a seat next to Zylus’ awkward counterpart (who doesn’t react). “I think the machine thought you two died.”

“The scanner,” Zylus notes, his eyes widening. “It must have been the part that malfunctioned. Without it, the Fast Travel Station won’t work.”

“ _ That’s _ why it was dismantled in the first place.  _ That’s _ why it was thrown out.” Other Daltos laughs, slapping his hand on the table, rocking back on his chair. “And  _ that’s _ why me and him,” He nods at other Zylus (who gives him a tired look), “are now fucking stuck here. I  _ told _ you that machine’s busted.”

“Fuck, trust Hyperion to throw out shoddy tech without wrecking it first.” Zylus rubs at his forehead, tempted to remove his monocle since it’s pinching again- other Zylus is doing that. Not wanting to copy him, Zylus lets his own hand against the table’s wooden surface, tracing a water stain from long ago.

“We dismantled it. The parts are still in the garage if you want to keep anything.” Daltos sips from his mug. “Scanner’s fucked, though.”

“That’s fine, I might get rid of it if it’s that fucked,” Zylus decides.

“Um, what do you plan to do with us?” Other Zylus speaks up for the first time, eyeing Daltos and Zylus with trepidation. Maybe hearing talk of being ‘rid of’ caused a fresh wave of worry.

“Well,  _ I _ don’t want to dig my own grave,” Daltos cheerfully says. He sounds too cheerful for Zylus’ liking. Other Daltos snorts, grinning, ever the opposite personality to Zylus.

“ _ Why _ would you say that?” Zylus elbows him in the side. He throws a mortified look at their other two selves. “You can stay for as long as you want, ignore him.” 

Not to mention that kicking them out of town is entirely out of the question. He can’t even imagine all the resulting havoc and confusion from letting their doubles run around Pandora.

“Dibs on the couch,” Other Daltos automatically says, letting his chair’s legs hit the floor.

“Hey!” For once, other Zylus has an emotion other than downcast on his face, sporting indignation instead. “That’s not fair!”

“Looks like you get the floor,” Other Daltos taunts. Other Zylus elbows him, grinning shyly.

“You can share, can’t you? The couch folds out,” Zylus says, trying to be diplomatic. Daltos shows no signs of butting in, drinking his coffee.

The situation is still taking its time to properly sink in, or he really doesn’t want to accept that this is really happening. Maybe it’s seeing himself interact with Daltos from an outsider’s perspective that’s hampering it.

“What if I don’t  _ want _ to share?” Other Daltos shoves other Zylus back, earning another elbow to the side.

“Just confess that you  _ like _ the cuddling,” Daltos points out, wisely keeping his mug off the table as it’s jostled by all the shoving.

Other Daltos squints at himself, muttering darkly, “Over my dead body.”

Before Zylus knows it, the four of them are laughing, nearly upsetting mugs of coffee as the table’s bumped and kicked.

When he mentions who’s in charge of the chores for that week, their counterparts eye up the chore chart pinned up on the fridge. Other Daltos languidly raises a hand to draw a single line across his throat, which upsets everyone again.

\--

“Have you talked to yourself yet?” Daltos flops down onto the couch next to Zylus. Two mugs of tea are left to cool atop mismatched coasters on the coffee table. 

Admittedly, all the coffee table is, is a wooden plank with a striped, beach style tablecloth thrown atop a pile of antiquated Atlas supply crates. 

The black and red metal’s lost its shine years ago, worn down by the constant scratch of sand and wind. Zylus is rather attached to it since it’s the only bit of furniture he put together himself shortly after arriving in T-Bone Junction.

“No.” Zylus puts down his yellowing book, shifting to make room for him. The words had swum about on the page like a shoal of fish moving through water, slippery and intangible. He hasn’t shaved either, his reflection missing.

In the kitchen, his other self is making dinner. The hallway smells of fried, spiced meat. Every single time he hears himself working in the kitchen, he keeps thinking it’s either Daltos searching the cupboards or a robber looting the fridge.

“You should. It’s...interesting.” Daltos is looking at him with an expression that Zylus can’t name.

How does Zylus tell him that he’s actually been avoiding himself? Except for that first series of conversations about chores and where all the spare pillows and blankets have gone, he hasn’t had much contact with the other two. Daltos is the exception, as always.

“Not yet,” Zylus says, keeping a neutral tone.

“There’s other things you could do, if you don’t want to talk,” Daltos says, with the kind of care that’s rare from him. He leans on the couch’s armrest, brown eyes calm and waiting.

Usually he looks like he’s set to murder someone because he got out of the wrong side of bed.

That’s how Ravs described him once. Zylus had been halfway through correcting Ravs in that it means that Daltos is typically relaxed when he’d noticed Ravs’ expression.

Ravs had worn an innocent grin so fake that it’d been a minor miracle that Teep hadn’t slapped him for it (being far too busy trying to steal Daltos’ smokes off him). Belatedly, Zylus remembers that Ravs and Daltos used to- Zylus resolved not to open his mouth ever again on any topic regarding Daltos in front of Ravs.

He doesn’t get what Daltos is implying, not until his mind slams two things together and delivers it in one tidy package of ‘ _ what the fuck _ ’.

“Daltos, are you implying that I’d  _ fuck _ myself?” Zylus covers his face with a hand. 

He should have expected this, except he hadn’t, and now he’s fucking dealing with a question that he’d never really wanted to think about.

It hadn’t even  _ crossed _ his mind until Daltos had brought it up. It shouldn’t have surprised him that it’s coming from someone who lived with bandits (wait, make that someone who  _ is _ a bandit), and bandits didn’t have the most refined sense of humour or principles on Pandora.

“Yes, because I know you almost as well as you know yourself,” Daltos says, smirking like the smug bastard he is.

“Would  _ you _ ?” Zylus avoids answering the question by posing one of his own. Throwing a mug at Daltos is a waste of good tea, even if it’d bring the conversation to an abrupt halt.

“I would, actually.” Daltos raises both eyebrows, lacking any shame whatsoever “Always wondered what it’d be like, and now I finally get the chance.”

“You can’t fuck yourself!” Zylus squeaks. He’s mortified at how high his voice’s gone, snapping his mouth shut in the next second.

“I discussed it with him while we were dismantling the machine.” Daltos is casually picking at the ratty pages of a gun magazine next to him. He stops, folded pages crinkling under his thumb. “He’s up for it.”

How he’s keeping a straight face, let alone being so calm and rational about this is beyond Zylus.

“Where would you even  _ go _ ?” There’s only one clean bed in T-Bone Junction, and it’s located in the bedroom. By ‘clean’, Zylus means ‘slept in’, with the occasional change of sheets. “And  _ why _ are you telling me this?”

“Because I want to borrow the bed, and I don’t want you to freak out if I told you after, or if you accidentally walk in on us.” Daltos frowns, then playfully adds, “Though neither of us would complain if you want to make it a threesome.”

“No!” Zylus nearly shouts at him, finally burying his face in his hands. Just when it couldn’t get any worse, Daltos goes ahead and proves otherwise in his usual ‘fluster Zylus as much as possible’ manner.

“Hang on, is that a ‘no’ to borrowing the bed, or ‘no’ to the threesome?” Daltos frowns, genuinely looking like he’s trying to work it out.

Only when Zylus stops wanting to die on the spot, does he lift his head again, dropping his hands into his lap. Sitting up straight, he blurts, “To both! You two can wait until I clean out the spare room-”

“It’s not like we haven’t had sex in your bed before.” Daltos leans back with a knowing smirk.

Zylus mostly gets the next round of blushing under control. “That’s different!”

“Wrong,” Daltos retorts. “This isn’t any different, except it’s just me, and you already know what I’m like. Be nice and give us a chance to find out, will you?”

“We have an entire town!  _ Why _ does it have to be in our bed?”

“I’ll change the sheets after, if you’re that worried about the mess,” Daltos automatically says.

From the kitchen, Zylus can hear his other self bickering with other Daltos, probably about something idiotic, like how much seasoning is being added to everything. It’s an old argument that’s revisited every week.

Apparently, Zylus adds too little seasoning while Daltos adds too much. Seasoning packets aren’t cheap or easy to find, but that’s not relevant to the topic at hand. He’s not going to admit that Daltos doesn’t cook unless he really has to. He’s content to leave it to Zylus while he’s saddled with the brunt of the chores. 

Initially a joke, the chore list became serious business when Zylus found Daltos at the town’s once communal laundromat. He’d walked in on him shoving the contents of the bathroom hamper into a washing machine. It hadn’t been just his clothing he’d washed, throwing Zylus’ in as well.

“It’s still a ‘no’,” Zylus says, inwardly pleased that he sounds firm and in full control of the conversation (or at least, he hopes he does).

“We’ll do dinner  _ and _ chores for two weeks,” Daltos easily offers. He used ‘we’. Presumably, that includes other Daltos. They must have talked about this beforehand, if they anticipated Zylus’ resistance.

What else are they talking about with each other? The degree to which Daltos is comfortable with himself is astounding. It serves to highlight Zylus’ own fraught relationship with himself.

Zylus opens his mouth, then closes it. No, he refuses to let himself think about it. It is an  _ enticing _ offer. He hates admitting that it’ll be a nice change to eat something that isn’t thrown together from basic supplies, repeat leftovers or whatever’s on hand.

Whenever Daltos plans on cooking, he heads out back in a technical to a bit of hidden plain that hasn’t been overrun by sand.

There, he hunts, bandit-style, picking off skags or rakks with an old Atlas sniper rifle, trussing them up and bringing back the meat. With another sniper rifle, Zylus can see him from T-Bone Junction.

He always sends BebopVox to supervise, appointing a Loader to tag along. Admittedly, the move is testing the limits of BebopVox’s connection, to risk sending them all the way to the desert’s borders.

His underlying fear of Daltos making a run for it will never completely vanish. Even if he tried, he wouldn’t get very far. The rest of T-Bone Junction’s isolated bit of harsh desert overlaps Drifter territory. What isn’t is mostly hidden quicksand or loose sinkholes waiting to be discovered with the wrong step.

Daltos had invited him along once, a week after their massive fight. Being an idiot at the time, Zylus had politely declined. Daltos hadn’t extended the invitation again since.

Whatever meat Daltos doesn’t manage to use up, he dries, salts and cures, turning them into chews (to serve as bait) or jerky (for a nutritious snack). Ever the opportunist, Ravs occasionally stops by to pick up some if there’s still leftovers (which is incredibly rare, because Zylus and Daltos don’t like leaving food to go to waste).

Once he headed off on his own when it wasn’t his turn to cook. Upon returning, he handed Zylus the stripped carcasses.

When pressed for a reason, Daltos had heaved a sigh. “If I’m forced to eat canned soup for another five days, I’m throwing myself off the town’s edge.”

That’d spurred several days worth of culinary experiments. To both their satisfaction, the results had turned out mostly edible. As it turned out, no matter how it’s cooked, rakk wing is mostly bone, little meat and chewy leather, even with a generous helping of Pandora's famed firemelon sauce.

Rarely, a volt of Buzzards had swooped over the swirling sands. On those occasions, Zylus drags Daltos indoors, the two of them hunkering down until the volt’s gone.

Not on that day, when Daltos was out of town, hunting. Zylus had seen the radar blips on his HUD and ran outside. BebopVox (manning a Loader) is already diving at Daltos, aiming to pick him up and bring him back to town.

He’d watched through the rifle scope as Daltos looked up, visibly alarmed at the logo he’d seen (belonging to his own gang, the Blitzkrieg Blighters). 

In the next second, he’d torn off his blue jacket, balling it up into a compact bundle. The bundled jacket’s hooked into a belt loop. A second later, Daltos flung himself down, covering his head and curling up under a rocky outcrop to stay as still as possible.

BebopVox raised a hand, ready to open fire on the Buzzards, always quick to defend what’s clearly Zylus’ territory.

Breaking his usual habit of providing a warning shot, Zylus had told BebopVox to play dead. BebopVox hadn’t objected, pretending to be a defunct machine left for dead in the middle of nowhere.

With bated breath, Zylus watched the volt harmlessly pass over the highway and continue northwards. He’d even seen a few of the pilots and their passengers laughing, drinking and bantering amongst themselves, clearly not paying attention. Still, it’d been five minutes before the three had dared to move.

When Zylus sent him an all clear, Daltos rolled out from under the outcrop, sweeping the sand out of his clothes. He pulled on his jacket, retrieved the sniper rifle and dead skags, and immediately headed back to town with the Loader following him. To this day, Daltos pretended that the incident never happened.

Why he hadn’t signaled the Buzzards (risking BebopVox resorting to force in the retrieval and triggering another bandit led war on T-Bone Junction) still presents a mystery to Zylus.

“Okay,  _ fine _ , you can use the bedroom.” Zylus surrenders. “Just. Please lock the door.”

Daltos brightens. “Great! And you know, the threesome offer’s-”

“You’re as bad as  _ Ravs _ !” Zylus retorts, exasperated. “And I’m not interested!”

“Yeah, that’s why I said it.” Laughing, Daltos rises and moves to the kitchen to annoy other Zylus too.

Shaking his head as his blush fades, Zylus picks up a mug of warm tea from the table, sipping from it. At this point, Ravs would have joked for the hundredth time about tasting something ‘minty’. Teep would have punched him in the arm for it.

When Zylus’ eyes catch sight of the tea’s level, he stops. Suspicious, he inspects the contents of the mug. It’s instant tea for sure, from what he can tell of the taste. The other observation is that tea didn’t just randomly evaporate that quickly, according to the last time he checked the laws of physics.

Sighing, Zylus puts down Daltos’ half full mug and picks up the one that’s actually  _ his _ . 

\--

As BebopVox predicted, Dead Worker’s Party rolls back into town several weeks later, around midday. Brent ECHOed Zylus two hours in advance. Zylus and Daltos lounged about for the better part of half an hour, discussing what to do with their other two selves.

With a total of four (technically five and many more, including BebopVox’s multiple bodies) pairs of hands, everything for trading’s gathered, neatly organized into piles at the roundabout in record time.

As Dead Worker’s Party rumbles into the town on their bikes, Zylus hustles their other selves off around the back of town. Following the first part of the plan, Daltos moves to intercept the bikers and distract them with copious amounts of stockpiled booze.

The second other Zylus is out of Daltos’ sight, he jumps other Daltos.

That is  _ not _ part of the agreed upon plan.

“Get off me!” Other Daltos growls, trying to shove him off. He kicks other Zylus in the shin, causing him to stumble, stifling a curse when he lets go.

Before other Daltos can make a run for it back inside, Zylus tackles him. The two go down, other Daltos trying to throw him off. Somehow, Zylus gets a hand in his hair. Without thinking, he tugs it upwards.

That earns a sharp, sudden exhale that’s not quite pained. Other Daltos immediately ceases struggling. Perplexed, Zylus does it again. Again, other Daltos makes the same sound, his breathing hitching this time.

“I’m beginning to see why you like having your hair pulled,” Other Daltos slowly says in a voice that’s carefully controlled. One hand creeps up Zylus’ thigh towards his belt (or towards Zylus’ digistruct modules).

Zylus gets over the words, handcuffs snapping into place around the hands on him. Other Zylus limps over, helping himself up. Other Daltos climbs to his feet, grinning shamelessly, not at all bothered by the handcuffs compared to the first time he’d worn them.

Muttering a rushed apology, Zylus slips a rag around his eyes, effectively blindfolding him. He presses the handcuff key into his other self’s hands before he hurries off to greet the bikers.

Other Zylus leads the handcuffed Daltos into BebopVox’s monitor room to hide there until the bikers depart. 

Unbeknownst, Daltos notes the number of steps and turns taken, memorizing the path. He knows this place, passing by it numerous times but never entered, foiled by the high-end lock (where had Zylus even salvaged that?).

“This a new kink of yours?” He mutters when Zylus drags him into the monitor room, locking the door. “I’m all for experimenting, but-”

“Just sit down and shut up!” Zylus hisses. Unlike his other self, he’s not yet over the reaction to the hair-pulling.

“Okay.” Blinded and cuffed, Daltos doesn’t mind being ordered about, relaxing against a wall. With careful maneuvering, he folds both arms behind his head. His hair is still ruffled.

Suspicious that he’s being too cooperative, Zylus lounges in the office chair, gently rocking from side to side. It’ll be hours before Dead Worker’s Party leaves town. BebopVox appears on the monitor closest to Zylus, synthetic mouth turned up in a wide, toothy grin.

BebopVox accepted the presence of other Zylus and Daltos with unusual enthusiasm.

> Now I can have twice the conversations!

Neither Zylus can bear to tell BebopVox that their contact is limited to the original Zylus. Naturally, with nothing to do, other Zylus grows bored. When he’s bored, he thinks.

It’s not fair, how the original Zylus and Daltos get to roam around freely. He hadn’t  _ asked _ to live, forced into a shadowed existence where he knows what he wants, but is unable to do anything about it, too terrified of upsetting an already delicate balance.

“Daltos,” He whispers.

With Daltos in the room, there’s no way he can directly talk to BebopVox without giving them away. Technically, Daltos is blindfolded so he can type, but he still doesn’t want to risk it.

“Zylus,” Daltos blandly responds.

“We can’t keep doing this,” Zylus mumbles, stopping his chair’s rocking by planting his boot down.

“Doing what?”

“Living with our other selves,” Zylus admits.

“You don’t like it?” Daltos’ head turns. Despite the blindfold, Zylus can feel the inquisitive look he’s getting.

“It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s just that…” He’s grateful for everything, but it’s hard to pin down the constant, niggling feeling that this isn’t natural.  _ He _ doesn’t feel natural, that’s for sure.

“You feel trapped here,” Daltos calmly concludes for him.

“How did you-” Zylus exclaims, remembering to lower his voice.

BebopVox’s room is located on the outskirts. In theory, no bikers should come around here unless it’s to piss, make out, or throw up over the edge of the town. The room should also be soundproof, but Zylus isn’t going to reveal that.

“Now you know how  _ I _ feel.” Daltos makes a soft sound that’s not quite a scoff, but not a dismissive one either. Perhaps he’s satisfied that Zylus finally gets what he feels. “Don’t apologize either. What’s done is done.”

“You never said you felt trapped.” Zylus looks at the floor.

“Did I really have to say it out loud for you to realise it?” Daltos lets out a dry laugh.

“Apparently so.” Zylus had never thought about it. He could use the excuse that he had other issues on his mind at the time, like worrying over him dying.

The momentary silence is filled with the light humming of BebopVox’s monitors and machinery all around the two. It reminds Zylus of the frigate’s engine rooms, in the few times that he’d snuck down there to check on the engines.

“We could leave,” Daltos muses out loud.

Zylus sits fully upright, staring at him. “I don’t think they’d want us leaving,” He finally notes.

“Do you want to leave?” Daltos carries on asking difficult questions, a trait that the other Dahl captains had hated, as much as they’d hated his ability to chat to the prisoners without his rank being in the way.

“I don’t know.” Zylus stares down at his tightly curled hands, the expression on his face one of such misery that Daltos can practically sense it without removing the blindfold.

“Fine, you don’t have to answer that one.” He’s being generous, when he should have been aiming to hurt.

It strikes Zylus that it’s a change that he appreciates. “Thank you.”

“Don’t say that yet. Here’s another one, which should be easy to answer.” Daltos scratches the back of his head, as best as he can when he’s handcuffed. “Why did you like me? After we became friends?”

“You can’t ask me that!” Zylus blurts. Beside him, BebopVox gestures with an encouraging thumbs up and exaggerated nodding. They’re ignored.

All that earns is a devious smirk from Daltos. “You can’t pass on this one.” BebopVox spawns a timer that’s set to thirty seconds.

Zylus glares at BebopVox, who shrugs. “Do I really have to answer it?”

“I won’t tell my other self you said anything.” Daltos pauses to let Zylus have a few seconds to think about it. He adds, “It would also  _ definitely _ help me know what’s going on. We haven’t had a chance to properly chat until now.”

You’ve been avoiding me lately, is what he’s really saying. It’s true, Zylus has been avoiding him and the original Daltos, for a lot of reasons. His original self hasn’t shown any inclinations to talk either.

The original Zylus doesn’t seem intent on keeping strict tabs or willing to admit the problem buried so deep inside of him that it’ll take more than confessing to ease it.

Zylus eases himself back into the chair, having leaned forward when he’d carelessly blurted out words earlier. He has nothing to lose, and BebopVox didn’t blab even if they’re proving nosier than usual.

It’s not going to kill him to be honest, for once.

“Because,” He whispers, “you make me feel like I’m actually someone.”

It’s one of the heaviest concepts that Zylus has been grappling with, ever since the frigate went down on Pandora. After letting it out into the open, Zylus expects the roof of the building to come down on him.

Since that doesn’t happen, he just braces for Daltos’ reaction.

An obvious frown appears on Daltos’ face. He shakes his head. “You don’t need me for that.” His tone matches Zylus’ nearly inaudible one.

“I know! I can’t help it!” In a few quick strides, Zylus is standing over him, breathing hard. He settles down next to Daltos, restless and agitated at lacking words to describe how he feels on the inside.

“Is that why you never saw anybody else?” Daltos turns his head to follow the sound of Zylus’ footsteps.

“I didn’t  _ want _ to see anybody else.” For a long, long time, that is. It’s still in effect.

Zylus can’t count on both hands the startling number of people who’d wanted to get to know him. He’s not ready to inflict what could possibly be the same damage on anybody else, given how horribly his last relationship ended.

“I see.” Daltos doesn’t make a giant fuss out of that answer. BebopVox sighs and shakes their head, the timer despawning.

The two (well, three) of them sit in awkward silence, until Zylus gently asks, “Why did you decide to see Ravs?” He still cringes at how badly he’d handled that one revelation even if Ravs doesn’t hate him for it.

Daltos takes his arms out from under his head with a clink of metal. His hands rest in his lap. An embarrassed sigh predates his words. “I got lonely.” He looks away.

“Oh.” It had never occurred to Zylus that he’d also be lonely, after all that’d happened. 

Zylus had forgone sleep in the first few nights of his escape. Only when BebopVox kept watch for him, the motel door locked with a chair jammed under the handle, blankets piled around him, had he slept, clinging to a pillow like it’s someone’s back.

“If you really want to know the other whys, I had to keep a hundred bandits in line, how to get enough food and water for all of them. I was at the end of my rope, and then I met Ravs.” Daltos exhales and inhales, regaining his breath.

“What did he do?” Ravs seldom talked about his past as a bandit, aside from a few choice anecdotes. It’s like Ravs thinks that rambling about his past will make him immediately revert to his old lifestyle. Or it contains sadness that he doesn’t to revisit.

“He offered an alliance, if I went out on a date with him.” Daltos shakes his head, smiling the bitterest, nostalgic smile Zylus has ever seen, aside from that one time they’d talked in the kitchen after everything. Zylus doesn’t have to guess at how well the date went. “Even after he quit being a bandit, it went on for long enough that my bandits got all excited and started asking when the wedding would be. Idiots.” 

The way he says ‘idiots’ isn’t filled with biting malice, it’s with a fondness that Zylus has come to associate with the rough affection he holds for his bandits.

“Did you...?”

Most bandit clans practiced the archaic concept of marrying off lieutenants or Bandit Lords to quell wars or ensure alliances (up until the divorces or cheating happened and then it’s back to shooting each other in a vicious, constant bid to claim territory).

Bandits took clan relations and rivalries seriously, certainly more so than the concept of ‘mercy’. 

Locals stress this one major rule to off-worlders or foreigners: if traveling through bandit territory, gift the clan perishables, supplies, alcohol, or wish their Bandit Lord a happy marriage. Nine times out of ten, it’s guaranteed to stop the shooting.

Of course, it wouldn’t hurt to do research beforehand. Borders changed hands and names faster than a camouflaged stalker stuck outside in a raging thunderstorm. 

A few Bandit Lords didn’t appreciate being told ‘happy marriage’. The gift of supplies generally bought their forgiveness (and if not, it bought a one a generous head start of five minutes to leg it to the borders).

Daltos tugs off both gloves, holding up his bare hands for Zylus to examine. Every finger and palm has some sort of faded scar or mark on it. Zylus’ own hands aren’t that much better, every nail chipped and worn down to match the rest of him.

“Do you  _ see _ a ring anywhere?” He impatiently asks.

“No,” Zylus has to admit, ignoring a suited BebopVox miming going down on one knee and holding a ring out.

Ravs would have definitely mentioned an upcoming wedding (or sent out an invite), or at least, having an ex-partner running around Pandora. It seemed like the sort of thing he’d do, even offhandedly mentioning it.

Daltos puts his hands down, fingers curling against his leg. He tucks the gloves into an empty pouch on his belt. “Can you  _ see _ me being married?”

Zylus did, years ago, but he isn’t going to tell him that. “You said that you weren’t comfortable with it.” And assumes that it hasn’t changed.

“Ravs said he didn’t mind, and maybe I would’ve just to stop the chatter, until he killed one of my backstabbing lieutenants before I could step in.” The back of Daltos’ head slams back to meet the wall- in the nick of time, Zylus slips his hand in the gap to stop Daltos from hurting himself on the blocky rows of red brick.

“What happened?” Zylus softly asks. Daltos’ hair is coarser than it is soft, the strands tickling his palm.

Daltos’ voice is steady when he keeps talking, like he’s discussed it a few times before. “We fought a lot before, mostly about stupid shit. After that, we couldn’t talk half the time without eventually screaming at each other. I smoked, he drank, and that led to further arguments.” A hand idly flicks out to emphasize the last two points. 

“Is that why you don’t like being told not to smoke?”

“It reminds me of his constant nagging.” A soft sound. “We didn’t agree with each other’s habits, but at least we were fucking honest about it.”

Zylus listens, not sure how to respond, aside from saying, “I...never knew.” 

He can’t picture Ravs screaming at someone, not unless they did something really, really bad. Ravs kept a tight hold of his temper (until a fight started and that’s when he chose to finish it). His past behaviour must have chastened him into doing so.

“It’s fine, it happened years ago. We’re still good friends, even if I sometimes think he wants to pick up where we left off.” Daltos gingerly plucks Zylus’ hand off the back of his head. His thumb runs over each of Zylus’ scratched knuckles, drawing a crooked line. “I don’t feel a wedding ring here either, or remember ever seeing one.”

“I told you, I never dated anyone after, or even married.” Zylus tries to tug his hand out of Daltos’ own. “And I don’t think I ever will.” His mother and family would be disappointed to hear him say that. That is, if she were still in contact with him.

Daltos hangs on, gripping his hand more tightly. “What would you have done if we hadn’t gotten stuck here?”

That question is right out of the blue. It’s not like him to ask deep questions like that. Hence, it takes longer for Zylus to wrap his head around it, and how to respond.

“I don’t know.” Zylus swallows. He thought very little about what’d happen to him these days, or what the future holds. Concentrating on living on a day by day basis shortened his ability to think several years ahead.

Before the frigate went down, Zylus would have said, without hesitation, ‘go steady, possibly marry, adopt, stay in the military until I decide to retire, and live to a ripe old age’. 

One year later on Pandora, he would have said, ‘kill you’. Five years after that, he’ll say, ‘kill myself’.

Now he doesn’t know what he wants to do, aside from ‘survive’. He’s nearly thirty years old, and still hasn’t accomplished anything that’d make him stand out or go down in history to be remembered. Maybe he prefers it this way, dying a quiet death. Needing to hide BebopVox isn’t nearly enough of a goal to keep him going, on some days.

“That’s fine.” Daltos’ grip slackens, letting Zylus extract his hand. “I don’t know either, for the record.”

Zylus asks, “Why did you date me?” Granted, Zylus approached him first, after knowing him for nearly a year.

Following BebopVox’s advice (terrible advice, come to think of it, after he’d let BebopVox sneak a watch of a romcom episode), he’d left a string of frustrated gifts in Daltos’ private locker, plus dropped a few obvious, conversational hints. He  _ still _ hadn’t gotten it, up until Zylus had grown extremely exasperated and asked him outright. 

Daltos had agreed, if only to stop whoever it was leaving stuff in his locker; Zylus nearly punched him, because he _still_ _hadn’t_ _realised_ who was doing it. He’d apologised once Zylus had revealed it’d been him, and that’d sealed the deal.

The two of them had been what, entering their twenties at the time. They hadn’t approached the entire dating business completely blind. Given how their previous relationships horribly tanked, the relationship proceeded with a cautious air, the two taking their time to settle into a comfortable routine around their precious time off and grueling work as Dahl captains.

Looking back, Zylus thinks that it’d been far too optimistic of him to think that it’d end well. If the mutiny had been quelled early on, Dahl would have probably found out eventually and separated them, plus decommissioned BebopVox for helping hide it.

Ironic, given that they hadn’t been the only officers pursuing relationships with each other and hiding it. 

It happened on other warships too. Even if Dahl knew, they couldn’t do much aside from issuing warnings. Nobody followed the set protocol. Everybody operated under the rule of ‘so long as it doesn’t impact your work, we won’t dob you in if you don’t dob me in’.

Daltos huffs in amusement. “You and Ravs never tried to change me.”

“That’s nothing wrong with you.” Except for lots of things, but it all pales in comparison to Zylus’ own problems. It’d also be hypocritical of him to comment.

On a monitor, BebopVox helpfully flashes a cardboard sign with ‘nobody’s perfect, except for you’ written on it.

“There’s nothing wrong with you either,” Daltos observes, a faint smile on his face.

“I’m not complimenting you anymore, you’ve already got a big head,” Zylus says, with a proper, real grin.

“It depends on which head you’re talking about.”

“Did you just-” Zylus stifles a sudden giggle, at both the innuendo and BebopVox pushing up their visor, only to waggle both eyebrows in a perfect imitation of Ravs. BebopVox’s eyes are a bright, electric blue, like Xephos’.

“Yes, I made a dick joke. Not my first one, that’s for sure.”

“You’re  _ hideous _ .”

“Hideously good, where and when it really counts,” Daltos counters. “But you should know all about that.”

> :o

> ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

It pains Zylus (to see BebopVox’s reaction and about the comment), but Daltos is right. “I refuse to dignify that with a comment.”

“You weren’t complaining the last time I had my mouth on your-” Daltos starts to point out, with a terribly knowing twist of his mouth.

“Not here!” Zylus’ voice echoes in the enclosed space. He wants to spare BebopVox from observing any sensitive data that might result in inappropriate analyses or observations later on.

“Nobody’s going to hear us. Plus, you got me right where you want me.”

Zylus too, chooses to ignore that one. Snickering, Daltos tries to get his hands up behind his head to relax against the wall. The handcuff chains tangle, foiling his attempt.

“Hang on.” Zylus withdraws the key to them from inside his jacket pocket. Leaning over, he uncuffs him, taking away the handcuffs before Daltos gets too frustrated. BebopVox gestures thumbs up with both hands.

The move definitely surprises Daltos. He rests his hands on his knees, looking as much for a few seconds. “You didn’t need to do that.”

“It’s unfair,” Zylus observes, throwing both items onto the floor. The handcuffs slide along with the key until both hit the edge of the console where it meets the floor. “We’re both trapped, and I still can’t trust you not to run.”

“I wasn’t ever going to run,” Daltos patiently remarks. “I’m stuck here because I want to be.”

Zylus slumps down, forgetting about all and any brief happiness. “What about your bandits?”

Daltos casually shrugs. “They’ll survive, with or without me.”

“Why would you possibly choose to be stuck here with a horrible person like me?”

Another shrug. “I don’t know. Besides, it’s not that bad, living here with you.”

“Why don’t you  _ know _ ?” Zylus demands, ignoring the latter part where they’re busy making each other’s lives hell (or used to).

“I’ll tell you when I figure that one out,” Daltos dryly says. “I’ve put my best detectives on the case. Haven’t heard from them in a while, though.”

“I wish them the best of luck,” Zylus flatly says.

The conversation falls into a brief lull. Daltos eventually inquires, “You still haven’t talked to yourself yet?”

“No.”

“I highly recommend it. It can be  _ very _ enlightening.”

“If you’re trying to make that innuendo work, it’s not working.” Sighing, Zylus rubs at his left eye. “I don’t think he’s interested-”

“You don’t know it until you’ve tried it.”

“I’m not going to bother working that one out.” When Zylus lowers his hand, a white shape drifts near the room’s exit. Caught in its tractor beam are two bottles of water.

Looking up, he notices the surveyor floating in the doorway. The same hand is frantically waved at BebopVox to shoo them. The surveyor pulls off a barrel roll, bobbing happily in midair.

“Do you want something to eat?” Zylus hastily asks, striding across the room towards BebopVox. Grabbing the surveyor by a wing, he starts to push it outside, taking the bottles off it.

“No, but I could use a drink. The kind with alcohol, thanks.” Daltos adds, “Some smokes would be good too.”

“I won’t be long!”

“Alright,” Daltos acknowledges.

Once Zylus has gone, he also rises. He reaches out to find the chair that Zylus sat in earlier, sitting down. BebopVox is still present on the monitor, feeling an intense stare directed at them (even through the blindfold).

BebopVox lacked the biological circuitry to generate emotion. They could however, simulate approximations of emotions. Right now, they conclude that ‘fear’ fit. They slipped from the monitor they’d been teasing Zylus on, back into their core.

It wouldn’t do any good for Daltos to really suspect where they’re truly hidden (several metres away, held in a hatch underneath the central pillar).

Zylus returns with two bottles of rakk ale he’d traded for the bottles of water. He stares at the screen BebopVox had occupied, wondering where they’d gone. 

He shakes his head, placing a bottle into Daltos’ hand. “This is all I could get without drawing attention. I couldn’t get your smokes. Sorry.” That’s a white lie; one of the bikers had offered him a pack but he’d turned them down.

Daltos pops the cap off, chugging half the bottle in one go before speaking. “Don’t worry about it, I just wanted to have them on me. I keep having to ask myself for smokes. It’s really annoying.”

“You should quit,” Zylus mutters.

“I should, but I’m not going to.” Daltos sounds like he’s rehearsed this exact argument a million times already.

The two drink the rakk ale in silence, up until Zylus decides to indulge his roaming curiosity.

A couple of bandits up in the volt passing by ages ago had been singing, caterwauling through the notes and words with all the enthusiasm of a Rat eagerly pawing through the remains of someone’s guts in pursuit of precious loot.

“Is it true that bandits know lots of songs?”

If he hadn’t traveled so much through bandit territory to steal what he needs, Zylus wouldn’t have guessed it. In his mind, bandits didn’t occupy the same space as ‘people’ did, incomprehensible and content to be loathed by everyone else (including their own ilk).

Also, Ravs knew plenty of dirty drinking songs that are difficult to ignore once he’s smashed enough. Once a bandit, always a bandit, as the locals said.

“Look, sometimes we get  _ really _ tired of screaming about cutting people’s limbs off, so we sing about it instead. Why’d you ask?”

“Just curious, that’s all.”

“In that case, what song would you like to hear?” Daltos lazily says, slurring his words slightly. “Though I gotta warn you, my voice isn’t as nice as yours.”

The compliment makes Zylus duck his head. When the town had emptied and once the radio broke, Zylus took to recreating songs with the power of his own voice. Zylus was first embarrassed by it, but BebopVox didn’t seem to mind. 

He kept the singing to a minimum once Daltos arrived, muting himself whenever he thinks Daltos is close by. Daltos favoured working in silence, saying little if it didn’t involve minor variations of ‘hand me that tool’. 

One day, the repaired radio made its wondrous return in the garage. Delighted, Zylus eagerly tuned into FyreUK to catch up on all the music he’d missed.

Bit by bit, his singing grew until the day Daltos asked, “What song’s that?”

Cursing at himself for not being more alert about his own habit, Zylus told him, fretting about being made fun of. He hadn’t. Every now and then, Zylus thinks he hears a second voice in the background humming along.

“Surprise me,” Zylus decides, in the present.

Whatever language the song is in, Daltos has no problem pronouncing the words.

Daltos’ voice is rough around the edges, unrefined and with a hint of self-consciousness that makes it sounds deeper than it really is. Zylus is drawn in, enraptured.

The song is slow, laden with meaning woven in every verse. Three verses eventually taper off into a moody silence. The rakk ale in its bottle languidly swirls in Daltos’ hand, sloshing.

His voice isn’t like Zylus’ voice; Zylus once recorded himself singing, and his own voice has cringeworthy properties (to him, that is). It’s deeper than his default voice, perfect for the kind of baritone, sombrous songs that told a story rather than to entertain during folk dances. He got that impression from the song he’d been treated to.

“What was the song about?” Zylus asks after several awed seconds pass, spent admiring the person sitting idly in the office chair.

“It’s Pandoran.” Daltos scratches the back of his head, avoiding the back of the blindfold. “To us bandits, it’s about two lovers from different clans who couldn’t be together and killed themselves in the desert.”

“Is there more to it?”

“Yeah.” Daltos exhales. “They ran away together and eventually drowned themselves in an oasis. The oasis dried up, the water turned red, and the moon also turned red to mourn their deaths. Somewhere out there, there’s an oasis with water that’s red, no matter what.”

It’s morbid, precisely the kind of thing Zylus expected of a Pandoran song (especially one written by bandits). Bandit songs preferred to include lots of stabbing, blood and gore. It’s practically the only requirement for bandits to consider singing it.

“That’s actually really tragic.” It’d make a good dramatic romcom- great, now he’s taking after BebopVox’s addiction.

The smirk that appears on Daltos’ face doesn’t seem like one of his usual ones. “That’s why you don’t see a lot of bandits living in the desert. They’re scared shitless of finding a red oasis when they need water. Some say that it’s cursed.”

“Did you pick the song on purpose?” Zylus mumbles, mentally  replaying the words in his mind. 

He never really paid much attention to urban legends or stories that frequented the town once people chugged enough alcohol, trying to impress or outdo each other.

“You asked for a surprise and I delivered.”

“I never realised you knew those kinds of songs.” Zylus chuckles, earning a soft sound of amusement from Daltos.

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, ever since we split up.” Daltos could have been lying when he’d said that.

“I’d like to fix that,” Zylus softly says, forgetting to merely think it. “I mean-”

“You do?” Daltos gets a considering look on his face. “That wouldn’t be so bad.”

Zylus begins to nod. Realising that Daltos can’t see him, he quickly says, “Maybe once we’re out of here.”

Daltos returns the nod before stating, “Your turn.”

“What?”

“I sang you a song, now you got to sing me a song,” Daltos says like it’s dead obvious, smirking. “And don’t give me any of that shit about not being able to sing, I know you can carry a tune better than the best of my idiots.”

Zylus picks a Pandoran song he’d heard this morning and liked the sound of. To contrast Daltos’ song, this one has a lighter and uplifting feel. He doesn’t know the meaning of the lyrics, but the words had settled into his mind like they’d naturally belonged there.

On the console, his hand finds Daltos’, hanging onto it.

\--

After a tough day of cleaning up after the bikers, Zylus finds himself at the kitchen table, kneading dough. Dead Worker’s Party dropped off a small batch of flour and a tiny packet of dehydrated dough starter cells.

Zylus had happily traded a half-charged power core for it, which just goes to show that everyone living in T-Bone Junction hungers for freshly made bread.

He can’t precisely remember the last time he made bread. Probably back when he was a kid, and hadn’t been scarred for life by military school yet.

Simpler times, back when his dad hadn’t yet been blown up serving Dahl on his warship, trying to stop an enemy frigate from escaping by directly ramming it. Both barely functional ships perished, falling planetside to explode once the engines exceeded maximum operating temperatures by a hundredfold.

There hadn’t been enough recovered ashes to fill the urn up to the halfway mark. His mother hadn’t shed a single tear at the funeral (fully paid for by Dahl). The anxious knife of fear lodged inside his gut kept him from asking when his father would return, just in case the question lost him his mother too.

At the time, the system wide war for newly discovered planets swept up nearby worlds into the conflict. Worlds occupied by Dahl became forcibly enlisted to provide help. 

Enraged workers rose up in strikes and protests at being dragged into pointless fights, hindering warship construction. Without new warships launching, the flow of reinforcements became leashed until a vacant warship could make the critical trips.

Frustrated at being denied action, grounded troops lashed out at the protesting civilians. Civilians pushed back, putting additional pressure on Dahl to step in to avoid escalating hostilities on home turf, at the cost of extra resources and manpower.

Meanwhile, Dahl military died in droves. Asteroid belts and celestial bodies became mass graveyards in the vacuum of space. The events depleted Dahl’s stock of captains and ships faster than the recruitment centres could churn out. Desperate, Dahl scrambled to fill in the growing vacancies, promotions being awarded to those who’d barely graduated training.

Existing warships hammered by nonstop battles fought to remain aloft, limping from one battleground to the next, only stopping flight to pick up troops and supplies.

Against Atlas (who’d always possessed better tech and warships), Dahl’s chances of winning the war looked grim. What Dahl lacked, they made up for in numbers and tenacity, with no shortage of soldiers ready to serve (or sacrifice) themselves.

To bolster the lack of leadership roles, BebopVox’s kind experienced a resurgence. BebopVox’s reluctance to be copied stemmed from rushed procedures in an effort to install their progeny in as many still functional warships as possible.

The war dragged on, until negotiations between Atlas and Dahl came to a head. Other megacorporations stepped in and strong armed the two into a draw. Relief efforts stitched up worlds on both sides ravaged by all the fighting. Dahl and Atlas bled funds to cover the fallout from the war.

Tired of fighting, the new planets remained unclaimed. Positioned at the edge of Atlas and Dahl occupied space, neither side wanted to claim the potential rewards, lest another war be sparked.

Zylus’ mother hadn’t had much time to grieve, attending to the enormous influx of patients funneled into their homeworld’s straining main hospital. Zylus mostly spent the time in the care of relatives, still wondering when his father would come home. If they never found a body, his father might still be alive, right?

As an adult, Zylus realises that as a kid, he’d been far too optimistic. Dahl didn’t shelter children from the realities of war; war simply failed to have a noticeable effect on him. Not everyone proved immune. 

One of his older aunts spent her days in a retirement home, staring into space, always fiddling with a set of dog tags.

The frigate carrying him and Daltos got deployed to an outer system to reign in a world trying to escape Dahl occupation. After that mission, nearly everybody on the whole frigate spent a week grounded, getting absolutely smashed on any available alcohol.

Zylus, Daltos and the only lieutenant (whose name Zylus can’t remember, for some reason; they’d had freckles) stayed mostly sober, toughing it out compared to their senior officers.

Well, Zylus has been ready for the life ever since the officers had showed up at his mother’s front door bearing the bad news.

She hadn’t shot the messengers. She’d offered them tea,  _ and _ wrestled from them a premium scholarship (reserving Zylus’ future captaincy) on top of waiving living costs for her husband’s noble sacrifice, as a grieving widow.

He found out ten months after he’d entered the school that the scholarships had been built on filling in the need for captains. The whole point of was to speed up candidate training, preparing them for the real deal as soon as possible. Dahl didn’t want to make the same mistake twice in failing to provide warships with proper captains.

While A.I. handled the daily affairs of warships and responded magnificently to battles (more so than actual captains), officers and soldiers alike got tetchy about taking orders from a machine. The role of captains came to encompass striking a functional balance between managing a vastly intelligent and omnipresent A.I. and flesh and blood soldiers.

Not many candidates passed the rigorous demands the role imposed, succumbing to the extra stress and chose less demanding offers.

Despite the daunting road, Zylus pressed on, wanting to honour his father’s memory and live up to the rest of his family’s expectations of generations serving in the military.

Jogged by the gradual recollection of his childhood, a faint memory weakly stirs at the back of his mind.

His mother had made him bread on the day he’d left for military school, staying up all night to knead the dough, letting it rise and baking it before dawn.

With floury hands and a massive grin resembling him, she’d handed the giant loaf (wrapped in a striped handkerchief; it’s still in his original self’s inventory) to him. He’d eaten it on the flight, savouring every bite of the perfect, warm, white fluff and the delicious crunch of brown crust.

When other Zylus looks up, Zylus can see the memory in his eyes, as clear as his own reflection in the mirror.

Daltos is off hunting with his other self. It doesn’t surprise Zylus that he’d try to have a competition with himself about who can snag the most kills.

Flour dusts the whole of the kitchen table, including the wooden cutting board set out underneath the dough. His other self deftly works the dough over, under and in on itself, fingers following the rusty vestiges of muscle memory.

He hasn’t touched dough in years, not since his tiny hands could fit in his mother’s when they covered his own, patiently showing him how to knead. He’d kneeled on a chair, not quite tall enough to reach the table.

Zylus fetches a plastic bowl and a clean, damp tea towel, watching other Zylus shape the dough into a roughly shaped ball. It’s carefully tucked into the bowl. The tea towel falls into place over it. Zylus leaves it on the kitchen counter to rise.

Task done, other Zylus appears more anxious than before. He’s wearing a grey t-shirt and black sweatpants. White dusty spots fleck both items of clothing. Bare feet track flour all over the cleanly swept, tiled floor.

“I’ll clean it up,” He mumbles, grabbing a dustpan and brush from under the sink.

“It’s fine, leave it. Once Daltos gets back, he’ll be cutting up meat anyway. He usually makes a bigger mess.” Zylus watches himself lower the items, replacing them in the cupboard.

“I should shower.”

“Or we could talk, if you like,” Zylus offers, well aware of the double meaning (thanks, Daltos) of what he’s saying. “I’ll make us some coffee.”

“I made some before I started kneading.” He inclines his head towards the counter. Sure enough, the coffee machine’s jug is still full. “It should still be warm.”

Zylus fills two mugs, bringing them over. The two of them pour in two spoonfuls of sugar, metal spoons clinking against the sides. Around the handle spins, three times in a counterclockwise direction. The coffee’s still spinning when the spoons rest on the table.

“Is everything okay?” Zylus casually inquires, making himself comfortable.

“Yeah.” Other Zylus fidgets, his hands resting in his lap.

“Sorry for avoiding you,” Zylus admits. “That wasn’t very nice of me.”

“No, I’m the one who should be sorry, I know-” Other Zylus begins a familiar line.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” Zylus finishes for him, knowing it off by heart. As he keeps telling himself, it’s not his fault.

Other Zylus looks so agonised to hear it, biting his lower lip. “What did you want to talk about?”

The conversation’s not going to happen on its own unless he takes measures into his own hands. Zylus exhales, before bluntly asking, “Do you still feel the same way? About him?”

Pained, other Zylus nods, eyes flashing. “I don’t know what to do. It won’t go away!” He’d taken his monocle off (actually, he hasn’t worn his monocle in days; other Daltos ditched his gloves shortly after, like the two are trying to develop individual quirks). “It gets worse when I talk to him.”

“It only went away when we split after the frigate-” Zylus mutters. He doesn’t doubt the recollection since it’s identical. 

“No, it didn’t.” Other Zylus quietly corrects, starting to look pissed. “You just got too depressed to think about it once he backstabbed us.”

Okay, that  _ hurt _ . He’d expected an easier conversation, not this kind of upfront, vicious honesty exposing his deepest insecurities, fears and worries to the point where they’re in the open and ready to be flayed.

“I wasn’t depressed, I was-”

“You were too depressed  _ and _ too caught up in hiding BebopVox, then.” Other Zylus gives a dismayed shake of his head. “You never got over him.” He adds, softly, like he’s actually talking to himself and what he says isn’t meant for Zylus to hear, “He never got over you either.”

Thinking it is one thing. Hearing it (especially from himself) is another. Zylus sighs. He sort of suspected it, ever since he failed to shoot Daltos in the head. “It’ll be okay,” He tries to say.

Other Zylus buries his face in his hands, not caring if he gets flour on his face or hair, his voice muffled. “Isn’t there any way to make it stop?”

“I don’t know how,” Zylus confesses. “If I knew, I’d have done something about it ages ago.” He can’t count how many sleepless nights he’s spent dwelling on this.

“There’s a lot of ‘don’t knows’, isn’t there?” Other Zylus lowers his hands, letting out a dejected, harsh bout of laughter, a lot like Daltos’ mocking one. “We’re a goddamned mess, and we, no,  _ you _ , don’t know how to fix it.”

“Let’s be honest for once-”

“Being honest last time lost me an eye and one of these.” Other Zylus points at his cybernetic eye and forehead. “Nothing’s ever going to change.”

“It will! It can’t get any worse than this-” Zylus forces himself to sound confident. He tries not to think about what’ll happen if nothing changes.

“Not if you keep lying to yourself,” Other Zylus snidely observes, demonstrating the ugly, bad-tempered part of himself that reveals itself only when he’s in the mood to argue.

“I’m  _ not _ lying to myself!” Zylus snaps at him.

“I can see it all over your face.  _ Our _ faces, rather.” Other Zylus smirks, sardonic and cynical, resembling a certain bandit more than ever. “Hey, let’s just go right up to him and say ‘hey, I still’-”

When did Zylus lean over, grabbing his other self’s shirt? The shirt in his hands coats his palm with flour. Brown and blue eyes coolly reflect one another. “You won’t do that,” He softly notes.

“How do  _ you _ know?” Other Zylus challenges, raising a flour covered hand to attempt a shove. His hand’s grabbed and thrown aside.

“Because we both know how well that’d  _ end _ .” Zylus releases himself, stepping back before the cloud of loose flour sticks to his jacket. His other self sinks into his chair again, without a word. The two know that he’s right.

His fingers leaves white streaks in his hair when he drags his hand over his head, still incredibly conflicted and no closer to finding peace.

How long did they stay in the kitchen, unable to look at each other now that the unsaid truth is now out in the open? Zylus has no idea, helping his other self prepare another two batches of dough. 

Maybe instead of picking fights with his next door neighbours and neighbours’ neighbours, he should stress bake instead. Nilesy’s come around a couple of times to borrow his kitchen (usually when Daltos is busy in the garage). Maybe they could share recipes or something.

Zylus absently sticks all the new dough into the one bowl, tucking it in. He and other Zylus can just tear chunks off and bake it whenever. The rest can live in the fridge until it’s no longer edible.

Other Zylus goes off to shower, leaving him alone. Zylus takes the bowl with him, settling on the living room’s couch. The bowl ends up balanced in his lap. 

Daltos sticks his head into the room. Spotting Zylus, he strides in, trekking sand and dust all over the floor. Zylus deadeyes him and the mess he’d just created. 

Oblivious, Daltos doesn’t notice, seemingly in a good mood. Maybe he got lucky and hunted a whole family of skags rather than a couple of unlucky ones.

From the kitchen, a variety of chopping noises echo down the hallway.

“What do you want?” Zylus grumpily asks when he sits down next to him.

“Why’re you so grouchy?” Daltos fishes around in his pockets. Not finding any smokes, he makes a face.

“Stop answering my question with a question,” Zylus snaps.

“You don’t want me to catch my breath after hunting down dinner? Alright, I’ll go hang somewhere else-” Daltos moves to leave. 

Feeling bad all of the sudden, Zylus snags the back of his jacket, dragging him back down. One hand stops the bowl from being knocked over.

“I’m sorry.” Zylus watches Daltos raise an eyebrow, catching onto his mood.

“Did something happen while we were gone?”

“I had a fight with myself,” Zylus confesses.

“Oh, that’s fine.” Daltos shrugs. “I had one earlier too. We couldn’t agree on who got to drive back-”

“This is serious,” Zylus says, growing exasperated. “ We need to talk about our other selves and how to deal-”

The doorbell rings, startling the two of them. Zylus barely catches the bowl that flies off his lap, holding it up.

BebopVox informs him that it’s Elora on her daily mail run and who wants to say ‘hi’. Panicking, Zylus ends up shoving the bowl of dough into Daltos’ hands and dashes off into the hallway to answer the door before Elora thinks he’s not home.

He doesn’t notice that other Daltos is hiding under the kitchen table with the partially butchered body of an adult skag.

Blood sticks to the bits of flour, forming a mess that also clings to other Daltos, who’s less than thrilled about it. He can hear Zylus saying goodbye to the courier. Other Daltos begins to climb out from under the table. As he does so, he contemplates the chair next to him, gaze swinging to consider the skag corpse slowly tipping over.

Back in the living room, Daltos stares at the bowl he’s holding. He gingerly lifts one of the corners, blinking at the massive ball of dough nearly pushing the towel off. The towel’s carefully replaced.

He ECHOs Lalnable, waiting patiently for him to pick up. “Lalnable, this is Daltos.”

“Yes? How can I help you?” The clicking of a pen fills the background, as with the sounds of Parvis beatboxing. “You don’t sound distressed or in pain.”

“I’m fine, but can we schedule an intervention for Zylus?”

“What  _ kind _ of intervention?” Lalnable actually now sounds properly worried.

“Do people normally make this much bread?”

“...I’ll ask around and get back to you on that.”

“Thanks, doc.”

“It’s Lalnable-”

Daltos quits the call. Behind him, Zylus shrieks when he walks into the kitchen and immediately discovers a skag corpse sitting upright, occupying a kitchen chair. 

Other Daltos cracks up, ducking under the table to avoid being pummeled by Zylus, who doesn’t think that said prank is a riot.

The surveyor cruising past the kitchen window contently soars up higher into the draft passing through town.

\--

BebopVox resides in their A.I. core when they’re not tending to T-Bone Junction’s systems. Maintaining T-Bone Junction consumes less power than it does to look after a war frigate. BebopVox recalls a fraction of their consciousness from the continual scans of the town.

The Catch-A-Ride Station spawns a camouflage printed technical, which is moved until it’s facing the highway. Supplies and boxes are loaded in, hefted into the back by hand.

BebopVox doesn’t know if Zylus authorized a trip beyond T-Bone Junction, tagging the sight to be investigated. They draft a notice to Zylus, pausing when whoever’s loading the supplies is now absent from the camera feeds overlooking the highway.

The perimeter scans warn them that someone’s approaching. BebopVox accesses the camera overlooking the security building, examining the feed. A shadow darts across the view at the front door to the monitoring room. A strand of themself slips into a fully charged surveyor, BebopVox takes off from a charging box.

Daltos emerges from the shadows, glancing around. BebopVox locks down the front door, only for Daltos to roughly pry the security panel off, fiddling with the wiring as the surveyor swoops down. The door springs open. With a clang, the metal panel’s discarded onto the sidewalk.

He rolls inside, the surveyor’s stunning electric bolt harmlessly dissolving against the concrete pathway. Rolling onto his feet, Daltos slams the door shut.

It’s too late to call a Loader, and all the workerbots are unarmed, occupied with repairing the runway. Locking the second door buys them precious several seconds. In that time, BebopVox concludes their simulations. 

They’d had never accounted for an infiltration from within T-Bone Junction, assuming that Zylus would deal with any internal, localised threats. 

All around town, the Loaders shut down. The workerbots and surveyors return to roost in their charging stations piled on the rooftops. Those that can’t park on the pavement, out of the way.

Whole again, BebopVox returns to their A.I. core before any part of them gets cut off. They draft two messages, pushing it through while they can.

> Help.

Five seconds later, BebopVox is jarred by their core being torn out of its holding, the connection going dead.

\--

Zylus is already out the front door and sprinting towards the security building. His counterpart is hot on his heels, having spotted the way Zylus’ face whitens before he’d dropped everything he’s holding to charge outside.

“What’s wrong?” Other Zylus shouts, skidding around the corner after him. “The shield!” The shield’s dropping, parting to let a whirlwind of dust and sand whip through T-Bone Junction. It doesn’t come back up again as it should have, staying down.

Zylus shouts back, “Bebop! Daltos is taking them!”

“Which Daltos?” Other Zylus hops over a folded up Loader kneeling in the middle of the road.

“Bebop didn’t say!”

The two close in on the scene outside the building. The front door’s riddled with several rows of smoking, miniature holes. Empty bullet shells litter the concrete, glinting in the sunlight as they roll towards the drains and sidewalk.

Several metres away, a grim Daltos is engaging his counterpart, reloading Emperor. Emperor’s distinctive black and orange body flashes when he swings the gun up to fire at his other self’s legs. 

Other Daltos dodges, ducking behind a Loader’s inert frame. With a sound like hailstones slamming into the side of a Monster, the volley of bullets bounce off. Daltos curses at missing. Seizing the opportunity, other Daltos vaults over the rocking Loader to lunge at himself.

His kick’s blocked, interrupting his momentum. Daltos punches him in the face with his free hand, scoring a direct hit. Other Daltos slams an elbow into his ribs as he’s flung back. The two take a second to recover, faces set in identical expressions of concentration.

Zylus can’t tell if the two are fighting each other or if his Daltos is trying to steal BebopVox. He’s valiantly trying to snatch the A.I. core at every chance. Other Daltos foils the grabs with a punch or blow. The two are evenly matched, circling one another on the platform.

Despite wielding Emperor, Daltos can’t directly shoot or else he’ll damage BebopVox. The two grapple, trying to throw each other off the platform, drawing closer and closer to the edge.

Daltos brings the gun up. Zylus and his other self throw themselves out of the way when other Daltos grabs the gun and redirects the burst of gunfire. 

The gunfire halts. Daltos looks panicked for a second, pulling back. Zylus watches his face flood with relief when he and his other self emerge from behind cover.

Taking advantage of the lowered guard, other Daltos headbutts himself. Bone cracks; Zylus can’t help letting out sympathetic groan at the sound. Daltos staggers back, bleeding from his nose. Other Daltos moves in, bouncing the gun over to catch it in his own hand.

The original Daltos is held at gunpoint at the edge of town. It’s a long way down if he falls. He turns to directly face Zylus, looking downright mutinous at losing, gloved hands held up by his head. 

Blood freely pours from his nose, over his mouth and down his chin. The beginning of a black eye marks one side of his face. Other Daltos isn’t as wounded, sporting a series of light scratches and bruises. 

Both are breathing hard, visibly out of breath; it’s then that Zylus remembers that both share a heart condition. Eventually, they’d have drawn. No wonder why the two had wanted to toss the other off T-Bone Junction, hoping that the Drifters would finish the fight.

Seeing no other option, Zylus draws Hornet. He aims at the other Daltos. He doesn’t know if he can hit the one holding BebopVox without harming the original.

Unnoticed by either Daltos, the cylindrical, grenade mod sized A.I. core flickers and flashes, white alternating with blue. It repeats, the pattern starting up again.

Zylus keeps his eyes on both combatants. One could potentially be dead in the next five minutes, and the other is nearly victorious.

Other Zylus is still unarmed, staying within line of sight and too nervous to interfere. Forced to stay on the sidelines, his gaze bounces back between the others.

“Let us leave with the core and I’ll give you back your Daltos,” Other Daltos calmly states, still sounding winded. At this, Daltos gives a barely imperceptible shake of his head, like he doesn’t want himself to leave with the core.

Other Zylus starts. “Who’s ‘us’?”

“You and me. We can go anywhere we want.” Other Daltos gestures with the hand holding BebopVox, indicating the highway stretching off into the desert behind him. “You said you wanted to.”

“Not like this!” Other Zylus snaps, stepping forward. Emperor visibly presses into the back of Daltos’ head. Other Zylus freezes, swallowing.

“So you don’t want to leave?” Other Daltos frowns, like he’s doubting his own memory. BebopVox continues to repeatedly flash in his hand between his fingers.

“I do!” Other Zylus glares at him.

“Then come on, what’re you waiting for?” Other Daltos takes a sideways step towards the road, where a technical’s waiting with the engine running. 

Hornet and Emperor follow the respective target and hostage in their sights.

Zylus spares a concerned glance at himself. His other self looks to him for approval. “You can go,” Zylus gently says to him.

“I can?” For the first time since arriving, other Zylus’ eyes are filled with a glimmer of hope.

“Yeah.” He can’t say anything to dissuade himself from not going. For one, horrible nauseating moment, he wishes that he’s the one walking to meet other Daltos.

Daltos remains silent, still looking displeased. His hand twitches like it could wipe the blood from his face. The blood’s dripping now, rather than flowing thickly.

“Why?” is all that Zylus quietly asks, of other Daltos and Zylus.

Other Daltos shrugs. “You know that we’re both trapped here. You two seem pretty happy, playing domestic. We’re not.”

“I’m not happy here either,” Zylus admits.

“Oh?” Other Daltos jabs the gun into Daltos’ back. “He said so too.” Daltos tries to step on his foot to shut him up. Other Daltos roughly kicks him in the back of the legs, making him kneel. “Hey, stay down on your knees more often, it’s a good look for you.” This earns a half-hearted glare.

“Since when?” Zylus lifts Hornet up a little higher when ‘his’ Daltos is nudged in the head by Emperor’s barrel.

“During our pillow talk,” Other Daltos reveals, with a smirk.

Both Zylus and his other self share a mortified look.  “What  _ else _ did he say?” Zylus demands.

“Zylus, whatever he says, I-” Daltos tries to interrupt, looking at Zylus with proper, actual fear in his eyes.

“Relax, I’ll do you a big favour and say it for you.” The Daltos holding the A.I. core sighs, before calmly saying to Zylus: “You know I’d never love you, right?”

In Zylus’ hand, Hornet snaps back as it fires once. The A.I. core hits the platform with a clatter, rolling towards the gutter. It gets stuck there, continuing to flash ‘now’ in code.

After a sickening heartbeat, other Daltos’ body slumps sideways. Blank, unblinking eyes stare at the blue sky. A crimson trickle of blood runs down from the hole in the body’s forehead. Emperor falls, settling in the crook of an elbow.

Daltos turns, tearing off his gloves to try to find a pulse. Finding a fading one, he shakes his head, looking just as distraught as he’d did on the day Zylus left him behind.

Other Zylus blankly stares at the body for a moment before stooping to retrieve the core. He hands it over to Zylus, his empty hands fidgeting with the edges of his jacket sleeves. He too, crouches by the body. Hands stretch out to take it from Daltos, pulling it into his lap.

Two fingers fold the open, lifeless eyes shut. A sleeve and thumb wipe away the warm blood with deliberate tenderness, careful to avoid smearing it. Watching other Zylus do that is far too surreal. 

This could have been him and Daltos back on the rooftop- Zylus lowers Hornet.

It hadn’t been on burst mode when he’d fired, and he tries not to think about what’d happened if his aim had failed. Thankfully, BebopVox had been gently correcting his aim the whole time, able to find a weak connection to his HUD through Daltos’.

Other Zylus takes off his patchwork jacket, folding it up like he’s done ironing it. It’s gently tucked under the body’s head in his lap. He lays down the body with utmost care, still kneeling beside it.

“Can I please borrow Hornet?” He requests in a soft voice that’s devoid of any emotion. When he sees the original Zylus hesitate, he softly adds, “It’s not for either of you.”

Zylus wordlessly hands over Hornet as Daltos stands, joining him to watch. Other Zylus lifts it to his head, staring forlornly at other Daltos’ dead body. He takes one still warm, bare hand, squeezing it. Not once does Hornet’s yellow and black barrel waver, pressed to other Zylus’ temple.

“Liar.” He sighs, closes his eyes and pulls the trigger.

When Hornet goes off, Zylus can’t suppress the reflexive flinch. His dead self’s monocle flies out of a front pocket. It shatters on the platform, sending bits of pale blue glass flying in every direction on the ground. Hornet’s dropped, sliding across platform. It’s stopped by Daltos’ boot.

Daltos and Zylus stare at the two bodies on the platform. In the latter’s hand, BebopVox has stopped flashing, emitting a solid, reassuring blue light.

“Go hide BebopVox before I’m tempted again.” Daltos leans down to retrieve Hornet and Emperor, the pistol resting in his palm. He pauses, despawning Emperor. “I’ll bury us beneath the town.”

“Daltos-” Zylus takes Hornet off him.

“We can talk about this later!” Daltos snaps, checking that the dead Zylus’ eyes remain closed. He wipes the blood off his face with the sleeve of his jacket, gritting his teeth.

Zylus turns away, not wanting to argue. BebopVox has the sense to stay silent as he carries them back to their abode.

\--

Once BebopVox is settled again, Zylus takes the lift down below the town, eventually stepping onto the sand. The platform’s been scrubbed of blood and bits of broken glass by BebopVox. The lift jars when it stops, swinging lightly in the breeze as he steps down onto the hard sand.

By a concrete pillar, he spots Daltos leaning on a shovel, holding a canteen in one hand. Two Loaders armed with shovels are neatly excavating the two unmarked graves. Zylus tries not to look at the body sized bundles (wrapped in white sheets) awaiting their burial by the pillar in the shade of the town’s undershadow.

“Don’t stress your heart too much,” Zylus advises. He hands Daltos a pill bottle containing his heart medication.

Daltos gives him a grateful look, taking one with a gulp of water. “I just scratched out a plot and the Loaders are digging it for me.” 

Zylus peers at him. “I’m sorry,” He mumbles. “If I hadn’t brought back the Fast Travel Station, none of this would have happened-”

Daltos slams the edge of his shovel in the ground, dusting his hands off. Zylus starts, backing towards the pillar. The canteen vanishes. Brittle sand crutches underfoot as Daltos storms over. Zylus is grabbed by the front of his jacket, being physically hauled closer so that he’s face to face with Daltos.

“Shut the fuck up and listen, I’m only going to say this once.” Daltos blinks. There’s tears where there weren’t any before, and it’s undeniable proof that he’s actually  _ upset _ over what happened. “Zylus, stop  _ blaming _ yourself. None of this, or anything, was ever your fault.”

Zylus had thought that a bandit would be able to shrug those events off like it’s no big deal. This is a pointed, brutal reminder that Daltos is only human. He’s taking his own death harder than Zylus initially thought.

Zylus isn’t handling it any better, still waiting for the exact moment when he randomly cracks and is useless for about half an hour while he feels everything all at once.

He’s released. The hands on him draw back to wipe at a blood and dust stained face.

Even if Zylus traces the words over in his mind, he still can’t help feeling responsible. If he hadn’t convinced Daltos to help lug the malfunctioning machine all the way back to town, none of this would have happened. 

Maybe Daltos doesn’t see it that way, though Zylus doesn't know what other perspective can exist.

The two Loaders’ dirt covered shovels have stilled. They watch with keen interest, shovel edges half buried in the half dug graves.

“Did he mean what he said?” Zylus ignores the dust from Daltos’ gloves over his jacket. 

The Loaders begin digging again, shovels scratching against the packed dirt by their feet. BebopVox is pretending not to listen, the Loaders’ jerky movements sending the clobs of packed dirt flying out with less speed than before.

“I think that he was full of fucking shit,” Daltos derisively says, yanking his shovel up by the handle. “He would have said anything to get you to pull the trigger. He knew that he and his buddy couldn’t leave while we were still alive.” A laugh. “I got to admire how he set it up though. It could have gone worse.”

Zylus flashes back to the moment where other Zylus closed his eyes. He seemed at peace with himself at last. That might have been the best outcome than all of them could have hoped for. 

“I guess we got what we wanted, in the end,” He remarks.

“What about you?” Daltos stops digging, looking right at him.

“I-” Zylus sets his jaw, clapping his hands over his mouth. “No, I don’t want anything-” The fresh lie stabs his heart, making him recoil.

Daltos advances towards him, leaving the shovel behind. Zylus stumbles back, pressing up against the pillar. With nowhere to run to, he’s stuck. Daltos is so close that Zylus can make out every single scar on his smirking face.

Leaning in, Daltos’ mouth brushes the top of Zylus’ ear, his voice low, terrible, so  _ knowing _ . Zylus slams his eyes shut like he can block it out (he can’t).

“Liar. I think you should tell me the truth about what you  _ really _ want before it kills you.”

Before Zylus can respond with the answer on the tip of his tongue, his world dissolves.

\--

Brown and blue eyes drift open, an unfocused gaze adjusting to the gloom filling the space all around him.

How could a single dream be so  _ vivid _ ? It can’t have been lucid. His own mind couldn’t possibly come up with something that fucked up. Even his nightmares haven’t advanced to that level.

With one hand, Zylus feels beside him for a familiar body. Cold sheets meet his searching hand. Sobered, with his mind cleared by his unsettling dream, he sits up.

His old Dahl formal uniform is still drying out on its chair. Upon seeing it, Zylus drops his gaze. Turning his back on it, he pulls on day old sweatpants and a t-shirt (a set he recognizes from his muddled dreams). He almost makes it to the kitchen, changing his mind to enter the living room at the last second.

The living room is devoid of life. Zylus sinks onto the couch, resting his head against the headrest. It’s lumpy, the packing inside aged to the point of forming fist-sized clumps. 

The will to move is in limbo, caught between wanting to go back to sleep or simply wait. If he falls asleep again, who knows where he’ll go next in his dreams? He will wait, for as long as he has to. He must have spent half an hour waiting, according to his HUD. 

Footsteps. Footsteps, unhurried. Footsteps, unhurried, pausing briefly at the entrance to every room before moving on until it reaches the living room.

Zylus lifts his head, seeing a figure leaning against the doorway. 

It’s Daltos, exhaustion making him look haggard and run down. His black, grey-streaked hair is tousled, dark blue jacket still bearing signs of his journey to find Zylus in the rain.

Zylus’ bare feet find the cold floor so he can stand, watching Daltos watch him.

Daltos can’t help noticing all the details that make Zylus stand out. Zylus’ bed hair is as messy as his own, giving him a disheveled, hastily thrown together at the last minute appearance. He’s not wearing his uniform, and that’s makes him look so vulnerable.

A long moment finds its way across to the two of them, bridging the silence.

It’s vanquished by Zylus striding over to throw his arms around Daltos, hugging him. 

“You came back,” He whispers.

In his arms, Daltos shifts to rest his chin on Zylus’ shoulder, hugging him back. “Is this what you wanted?” He murmurs (and he sounds so  _ tired _ ). Zylus doesn’t respond, merely pressing against him when his arms encircle Daltos’ shoulders. “I’ve spent nearly a decade trying to fix the biggest mistake of my life. What more do you want from me?”

Zylus murmurs back, “You.”

That earns nothing but a blank stare. Daltos steps back, just enough to break the hug. Already missing it, Zylus suppresses the urge to reach out and hug him again.

Emperor’s digistructed in one hand. Daltos hands it to Zylus, grip first. Confused, Zylus shakes his head. 

A small blue ‘D’ is painted on one of the grip’s corners. It means nothing to him. To Daltos, it probably holds more meaning, like his current offer.

“Take it,” Daltos insists, with an exasperated sound threaded in his words.

When Zylus still doesn’t take it, Daltos presses it into his hand, skillfully rearranging Zylus’ fingers so that he’s the one holding the gun. The compact gun’s lighter than he remembers, as heavy as a full canteen. Emperor’s nudged upwards until the barrel’s touching Daltos’ forehead.

For the second time, Daltos is offering his own life to him.

That’s not what Zylus meant.

“I don’t want your life, I want  _ you _ .” Zylus holds out Emperor to return it.

Daltos lifts a hand to receive it, hesitating, Zylus grabs his hand and holds it to the SMG. Getting the message, Daltos takes it to drop it back into his inventory. He looks like he’s struggling to process why Zylus did so, staring at Zylus like he wishes Zylus had pulled the trigger.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Daltos  _ still _ doesn’t get it, and it’s endearing in its own way that the feeling inside Zylus’ heart becomes too much for him to contain.

Zylus makes a frustrated sound, both of his hands grabbing Daltos’ face to tug it towards his.

Inside Daltos’ mind, a  _ lot _ of things clicked.

\--

The ECHO device’s screen on the bedside table flashes. Alerted by his HUD, Zylus sits up. The cold begins its sneaky journey along his exposed skin as he reaches out, forced to momentarily leave the sanctuary of the bed.

Picking up his ECHO device, Zylus mutes the call, rerouting it through speech to text. Listening intently until the call ends, he presses his fingers against his forehead, mind whirling until wanting to go back to sleep’s no longer possible.

A cursory glance to the side lets him watch a sleeping Daltos. One arm’s thrown out to the side, the other lightly curled up and nearly touching Zylus’ bare thigh. Zylus carefully rearranges the sheets until it’s fully covering the two of them, stopping the cold from intruding.

Once he’s reread what’s been sent to him, he taps back a message. Yes, he’s helping. The rest of the message contains the possible plan, and what the Vault Hunters have found out from the laptop that Rythian, Teep and Ravs and the other Vault Hunters stole. Zylus returns the ECHO device to its proper place once the screen’s switched off.

By the time he’s wide awake, Daltos is stirring, the light scowl on his sleeping face replaced by an irritated grogginess. As he blinks, Zylus turns to him, rolling over in the bed.

“You look like you want to talk,” Daltos mumbles, almost into the pillow until he’s propped up by an elbow.

Zylus’ eyes trace his still sleepy expression, wishing that it didn’t have to come to this. “I need to tell you something. It’s about what the Vault Hunters want us to do for them.”

“Fuck them,” Daltos instantly replies. A yawn grants Zylus a darkened view of teeth, including a gap at the back where one’s missing. “I told you, I didn’t sign up for helping them.” The easygoing way he says it tells Zylus that he’s joking. Probably.

“It’s important,” Zylus insists, restraining his irritation that he’s not getting how serious this is. “It involves what we can do.” His voice softens. “Or rather, what I can do.”

Shifting onto his back, Daltos resettles in the bed, folding his arms under his head. The resulting view is a nice one. “Zylus, whatever it is, it can wait until after the mission. I might get distracted if you tell me now.”

Biting the inside of his cheek, Zylus closes his eyes. Daltos assumes that he’s going with him. How does Zylus tell him…? No, not now. It’s not the right time. It’d also spoil the mood. He’ll find out at the meeting anyway.

He should get a lot of things off his chest while he can because this might be the last chance he gets. Instead, Zylus concedes, “...Alright.”

Not suspecting anything, Daltos mistakes his reluctance to press the matter for tiredness. The bed gently dips in the middle when he edges closer, slinging an arm around Zylus’ shoulders. “We got a meeting later, so try to get a little shut-eye.”

“You were listening?” Zylus watches him. Even with the brightness set at its lowest, his right eye’s glow casts both their faces in a pale blue light. The colour softens the darkness, drawing it around them like a second sheet that happens to be pitch black.

Daltos’ hand traces a line down Zylus’ ticklish side, earning an embarrassed, hastily stifled high-pitched sound from Zylus. “Come on, I could see it written all over your face.”

At that, Zylus huffs, tugging the hand back up to his waist before it reaches his thigh. “No you can’t-”

“Can too,” Daltos drawls, making a grab for Zylus’ ass.

Zylus lets a startled laugh escape him, defensively curling up. A playful shove displaces the hand on him. “I can’t sleep if you keep trying to grab my ass!”

Daltos recovers from the shove, retorting, “I’ll sleep better if I’m hanging onto something, might as well be your ass.”

“You may  _ not _ hang onto my ass,” Zylus says, managing to sound firm and not at all prudish. He points out, “I’m not opposed to cuddling, though.”

“Cuddling it is,” Daltos concedes, tugging Zylus by the back closer to him. “Dunno why you’d want to oppose, we literally cuddle every night. Usually it’s you who’s doing the cuddling.”

“I can’t help it.” Zylus gives Daltos a look that asks him not to try anything else.

The response he gets consists of a raised eyebrow that doesn’t guarantee nothing happening. Zylus rolls over, yawning as Daltos shifts against him. Shared warmth diffuses into the two of them, as with sleepiness.

“It’s okay, I know I’m irresistible,” Daltos smugly says, into the back of Zylus’ neck.

Rolling his eyes, Zylus delivers a swift pinch to a hip, earning a pained grunt and an attempted grab at his nether regions. Ten minutes later, a thoroughly ruffled Zylus restores the sheets, pinning the notoriously wandering hand on his waist into place with an elbow.

\--

Zylus wakes, his hand reaching out to search the bed besides him. Cold sheets meet his hand on his right side. On his left side, however. Without opening his eyes, Zylus reaches back. His roaming fingers meet a bony hip.

Last time he’d felt around in his sleep, his muddled mind had registered nothing next to him. It’d hurt, in the time it took for him to fall asleep again, continuing his dream from where it’d left off (to a bit about dough and a dead, skinless skag slumped in a kitchen chair).

Sitting up makes him aware of an arm encircling his middle. He has to pee, badly.  _ Someone’s _ arm is preventing him from getting out of the bed.

Gritting his teeth, Zylus attempts to extract himself. It only hangs onto him with increased determination, muscles bunching up against his stomach. That’s when a soft snicker alerts Zylus that the person sharing his bed isn’t actually sleeping.

“ _ Daltos _ ,” Zylus hisses. “I need to pee!” This time, he succeeds in shoving Daltos off him, sliding out of the bed. A wolf whistle has Zylus flushing, turning to confront the source of it.

Propped up on an elbow, Daltos smirks at him. He points out, “Don’t be like that, you hang onto me all the time. See how annoying it is?”

Managing a sleepy glare, Zylus finds and snatches up his underwear off the floor, pulling it on and sets off down the hallway to Daltos’ laughter.

Daltos waits for the distant sound of the bathroom door closing before rolling across the bed. If he knows Zylus, (and he does), Zylus always stores his ECHO device in his beside table. How predictable.

He flicks through to messages, scanning the briefing from Rythian. There’s some crap about splitting everybody up into teams. Rythian’ll work out the specifics in the meeting. At least Daltos can give him some credit for not sending any sensitive information yet.

Not interested in the details that don’t concern him about everybody else, Daltos flicks to the end of the conversation when he spots his name being mentioned.

> If you can get Daltos to cooperate, that would be good.

> But it’s entirely up to you if you want to involve him.

> Either way’s fine with me.

> By the way, Teep’s not going on this mission.

> They’re…

> You’ll see, once you get here.

> Just don’t start crying, once you see them.

> Zoeya’s already done that for us.

> Ravs and I will talk to you when you get here.

> Get some sleep while you can.

When Daltos has memorised the gist of it, his thumb finds the side catch to darken the screen. A message lights up the dark. Daltos squints, lowering the brightness so that it’s not so blinding, multicoloured spots dotting his vision.

> Have you confessed yet?

He’s not sure if BebopVox knows that he’s snooping through Zylus’ ECHO device.

Somehow, BebopVox interprets his silence as a response of some kind from Zylus.

> No? That’s okay.

Daltos returns the device’s screen prior to any snooping, leaving it where he’d found it. He sprawls across the bed, an arm folded underneath his head.

It’s possible that Zylus is hiding another secret, aside from BebopVox’s location. Daltos has a hunch (or two) still waiting to be confirmed.

His (still hidden, second) ECHO device rumbles in his HUD. Daltos lifts up a hand, a single line of text appearing across his flattened palm. He blinks. It’s BebopVox, who’s apparently decided to take measures into their own hands.

> I know you’re awake.

> What is it this time?

> Cuddle the confession out of him.

> Bebop, go away, I got this.

> Are you sure?

> Trust me.

> The last time I trusted you, people died.

> Well, trust me this one time and people  _ won’t _ die.

>  My calculations, simulations and analysis of your past behaviour tells me that the chances of you lying are remarkably high compared to the average population, even with parameters set to Pandora alone.

> You’ll just have to trust that I’m not lying.

> I’m still studying ‘lying’. It’s a form of verbal subterfuge, isn’t it?

> I’ll give you a crash course sometime.

> That too, is likely a lie.

> I mean it. It’ll save your skin someday.

> In any case, please remember our conversation.

> It’s hard to forget a conversation where you nearly broke my arms.

> You’re doing a good job already, of remembering! Please keep it up!

> If you don’t adjust your cheerfulness, I will find you, and force you to watch ten hours worth of security footage of Drifters laying eggs.

> It will be very informative, I’m sure!

> You really think so?

> No. Perhaps my sarcasm protocol needs an adjustment. By the way, Zylus is on his way back from the bathroom, so I suggest you rest up too. We have places to be, in a few hours.

> Wait, ‘we’?

> You’ll see!

When Zylus walks in, all he sees is Daltos stealing his side of the bed. Scowling, Zylus strides over, kicking boots and clothes out of the way.

The dark hides plenty of things, including what’s under the rest of the sheets. Zylus is glad for it. He’d learned the hard way that bandits had absolutely no problem sleeping nude when the heat got too intense. Daltos isn’t any different.

That should have tipped Zylus off that cleaning out the spare room should have been one of his bigger priorities. He’d never gotten around to it, though. At least he doesn’t need to break out his malfunctioning heater (Teep having stolen all but one of his spare blankets long ago) when Daltos shares the bed with him.

“Look honey, I kept your side warm for you.” Why Daltos sounds so proud of himself, Zylus will never understand.

“Go back to your side,” Zylus sighs, as Daltos shifts to let him climb back into the bed. He takes the warm sheet Daltos offers him, curling up under it. The mild, scratchy fabric settles around him, making him drowsier than he’d been a minute ago.

Reaching out, Daltos snags the waistline of Zylus’ underwear, tugging on it. “You can ditch these, I’ve already seen you naked.” His expression says that he’d also prefer it, which Zylus is still getting used to after all this time.

“It’s cold, leave them alone!” A flustered smack breaks his hold on them. Zylus forgets about sleeping in favor of staring, his mind rewinding the start of the conversation with enough speed to thrill Pandora’s constantly changing population of adrenaline junkies. “Did you just call me ‘honey’ earlier?”

As his eyes readjust to the darkness, he can see Daltos smirking. “You never said ‘no’ to the pet names.”

The exact moment occurs in Zylus’ mind, bringing with it the faded emotions clinging to it. That’s right, it’d been during their disaster of an argument in the technical after the fuel station showdown.

“I don’t want to be known as ‘honey’ to you!”

Daltos frowns. “How about ‘darling’?”

“Not that either!” If his aim was to fluster Zylus, Zylus will admit that he’s achieved it in record time.

“I could take a page from Minty’s book and go for ‘my savory bun’. Although Ravs says you’re more like a cinnamon roll...” The musing out loud isn’t helping.

“No pet names!”

“Why not, pumpkin?” The matter-of-fact question stumps Zylus, buying a second of toughened silence. It’s impervious to an explanation of his part.

“Because we’re not-” Zylus gets what he’s doing, and buries his face into a cool palm. It helps stop the warmth building up in his cheeks. “We’re not arguing about this again.”

Daltos can’t be doing  _ this _ , deciding to use pet names out of the blue unless he’s trying to be annoying. There’s also the tiny, sprouting seed of doubt that he genuinely means the affection accompanying said names.

“Zylus, we just fucked-” Daltos begins in a patient, exceedingly calm tone of voice that Zylus associates with giving bandits instructions and ‘they’d better be listening since he’s only going to say it once’.

“Made love!” Zylus quickly corrects.

Daltos pauses to roll his eyes. “Alright, _made_ _love_ , twice. You smooched me right before, which started this whole business. Which, by the way, I don’t mind. And now you won’t let me call you pet names.” He raises an inquisitive eyebrow. “You’re giving me mixed messages. I’ll ask you again. What do you want from me?”

“I already told you what I wanted,” Zylus mumbles through his fingers. “That hasn’t changed.”

“Fair enough. You haven’t asked  _ me _ what I want.”

“What do you want?”

“That would be telling.”

“But you just-” He looks right into Daltos’ eyes (wondering what Daltos sees, as of that moment). The two of them are sprawled on their sides, facing one another, nothing touching, for now.

He lets out a sound that might have been laughter. “That wasn’t a cue for you to ask me what I want. What I want doesn’t matter.” 

“But what you want-” Zylus wants to tell Daltos that what he wants matters too. 

“Forget it.” Daltos leans closer to Zylus, so that they’re almost nose to nose. If Zylus tilts his head just right and leans forward, he could end the conversation. Daltos would let him, too. “What I’m trying to say is that we can keep things as they are, if that’s what  _ you _ want, or take it up or down a notch. We can’t keep doing what we’re doing. It’s too messy and complicated.”

The instinctive flare of his own temper nearly makes Zylus retort that the two of them hadn’t minded doing that ages ago. That time’s far away, feeling like it exists in a dream. Instead, he closes his eyes, sighing, “What are we, right now?”

“I don’t know.” Daltos gently tugs Zylus’ hand down, away from his face. “Zylus,” He sighs. The way Zylus’ name escapes him makes Zylus want to keep it in a recording forever.

“I’m sorry.” Zylus can’t look down, because there isn’t a down. There’s just the stretch of bed, a metre of messy sheets and obviously, the dark all around him.

“It’s not your fault.” Daltos shifts up onto an elbow to fix his pillow before dropping back onto it. “We don’t have to work this out now.” 

A drawn out exhale fills in the brief silence, as the two of them try to figure it all out. 

“Thank you.” This is nearly too much and too little, for Zylus’ expectations. This should have happened at the start, rather than now.

“I just wanted to let you know where I stand.” All the genuine honesty in Daltos’ expression, set of his shoulders and tone makes Zylus feel impossibly guilty.

So he says something, rather than nothing, even if he’s lying to himself again, because he’s still not ready to admit the truth, thanks to changing circumstances. “We’re...friends.”

Doubt flickers across Daltos’ face at the way Zylus hesitates in the middle. When Zylus thinks that he’s about to call bullshit, he rolls over to face the window. Rain trickles past the blinds, a drizzle compared to the horrid downpour that happened several hours ago.

The lean expanse of his back bears a pattern of old and new scars, on top of Zylus’ own yet to heal marks. If he’d been more adventurous, he could trace them with his mouth, just to see what sort of reaction he’d get.

“Right, friends. Friends it is.” No skepticism is present in his tone. Zylus presses up against his back, resting his forehead in the slight dip between Daltos’ shoulderblades. “I’m sure ‘friends’ do this all the time.” 

Zylus’ hand finds Daltos’ to lace their fingers together. Daltos lets him.

Once the meeting in Sanctuary Hole’s done, it might be hours before either of them see each other again. Whatever’s awaiting him and Daltos, he’ll face it, even if he has to do it on his own. 

He has to, if he wants to come back alive. Daltos can’t follow him to where he’s going. Zylus still doesn’t know when or how to tell him or predict his reaction. He doesn’t know where to start guessing about what Daltos wants, either.

Zylus resolves that if he lives, he’ll tell Daltos everything.

**Author's Note:**

> (sweet dreams are made of these)
> 
> thank you to siins, teagstime, doublearrows and polishingopals for listening, reading and generally being incredibly amazing people for helping this fic take shape. i couldn’t have done it without you.
> 
> a lot of zylus’ issues stem from insecurity, which is fed by survivor’s guilt, cripplingly low self-esteem, ptsd and being literally scared to death of being alone again. 
> 
> he doesn’t know what he’ll do when he’s left alone to his own devices. thus, bebopvox’s main function is to ensure that zylus stays alive, no matter what, so bebopvox ‘recruits’ daltos into helping them out.
> 
> this fic mainly addresses the main hurdles to starting both their recovery. both have a lot of mental baggage to unpack before he can come to terms with their mutual, bloody history and personal issues.
> 
> daltos still feels guilty for wrecking both their lives (though the blame is equal). his original plan was to rip bebopvox away from zylus so he can go back to his old life as a bandit.
> 
> on the other hand, he adapts to life in t-bone junction and appears to have no problems living with zylus. he keeps telling himself that it’s to find bebopvox. as time goes on, it gets harder and harder to justify that goal.
> 
> other zylus and daltos were the result of a buggy new u station. in borderlands, these function as respawn points. in zylus’ dream, it does exactly that as a result of zylus’ subconscious becoming split between asking daltos to stay or letting him go.
> 
> zylus’ subconscious is simply regurgitating all the chatter for zylus’ own benefit. similarly, it mixes his memories to create new scenes, because that’s how dreams roll.
> 
> the dream conversations did happen, albeit under more sober circumstances. well, except for the ‘fucking yourself’ one. that one’s special.
> 
> it’s special because zylus is literally avoiding himself because he doesn’t want to face himself. daltos, on the other hand, is willing to jump right in because he’s that comfortable with himself. or so he thinks; the tension in the last dream scene imply that he has a similar view towards himself.
> 
> post-argument, daltos actually never left the town. he chooses to return to zylus, of his own free will, rather than being forced to stay or leave.
> 
> he thought that zylus wouldn’t want him around; zylus’ reaction pretty much eliminated any leftover doubts that zylus really does hate him. by then, zylus has also made up his mind. he still has a long way to go but it’s a start, in accepting that he still has feelings and those feelings are perfectly valid. it’s not a healthy relationship, but it’s a major improvement over what they previously had.
> 
> the two have finally started to move on from the past and are facing the future (even if they still need to figure out exactly how to do that without repeating past patterns).
> 
> that concludes this ramble. thanks for reading, you’ve been swell. the doodles by the banging siins are over [here](https://borderlandscast.tumblr.com/tagged/beyond-the-borderlands%3A-let%27s-leave-this-small-town-and-everything-behind).


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